No Cheers

Prices climbed--and went on climbing. Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics gave another altimeter reading: on June 15 its consumers' price index reached its highest point ever: 157.1% of the 1935-39 level. In a year, food costs in large cities had risen 31%, clothing was up 18%, house furnishings 17%. The national pattern was not uniform, but almost everywhere in the U.S. the postwar dollar was worth only about 50% of its prewar value in purchases of essential consumer goods.

The retail price ceiling was not in sight. Wholesale prices (including farm products) pushed up for the fourth successive week. The Agriculture Department took back a previous prediction that food prices might ease off toward the end of the year. Some basics were on the rise; during the week the average price of metal and metal products lifted 4%. Cement companies advanced prices. Diesel locomotives would cost 6% more. Chrysler Corp. added an average of $87 to the price of its passenger cars (thus leaving Ford and Studebaker as the only major car manufacturers who have held the price line since steel prices lifted).

Also Up: Hot Potatoes. All this caused an unseemly bit of scurrying in Washington. Attorney General Tom Clark hastily ordered his understaffed antitrust division to get hot after collusion in price gouging. Tom Clark blustered that jail terms were in store for businessmen who conspired to boost prices in food, clothing and housing.*

Republicans were ready with their own kind of investigation. Ohio's Senator Robert Taft took time out from planning his western political tour to announce the membership of two subcommittees of his Joint Committee on the Economic Report. They will hit the road in mid-September for six weeks of price hearings in cities of the East, the mid-continent and the far West.

No Hits: Two Errors. The press and the public had no cheers for the investigations, and hardly anybody thought that much would come of them. President Truman gave Tom Clark's campaign his blessing, but he did not think it was likely that it would bring about price reductions. It was also not likely to turn up many hot profiteering conspiracies. The truth was that Tom Clark's Justice Department had already investigated some of the thousands of complaints received since OPA's death and had dredged up nothing that really looked like an air-tight price-rigging case.

Columnist Marquis Childs, who does not often scold the Truman Administration, had an acid suggestion for the Attorney General: "If Clark looks around suddenly at a Cabinet meeting, he is likely to find a culprit or two within arm's length. Two fundamental errors of the Truman Administration contributed to the price spiral. One was the repeal of the excess-profits tax. The other was . . . the encouragement of labor in demanding additional pay."

From now until 1948, a big political argument would undoubtedly be: Who is responsible for high prices? But the main political point needed no spotlighting: the U.S. people were getting good & sore at waiting for prices to come down and seeing them go up instead. ^

*For news of a Government accusation of price fixing by an entire industry, see BUSINESS.

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