Profit in Recession

"There is nothing wrong with our economy that a good dose of confidence won't cure," declared Vice President Richard Nixon at a Republican Lincoln Day rally in Phoenix, Ariz. "The battle cry of the Administration's opponents is obviously going to be 'Depression is just around the corner.' Some are urging us to go back to the multibillion-dollar leaf-raking boondoggling which failed so miserably in the 1930s." If the Democrats are "betting on depression," said he, the Republicans are "betting on prosperity."

Less vividly, many another speaker at G.O.P. gatherings across the country last week joined Dick Nixon in a Republican counterattack against the Democratic drive to wring political prosperity out of economic recession (TIME, Feb. 17). All week long the Democrats kept up their offensive. The governors of Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington--Democrats all--dispatched a joint telegram to President Eisenhower urging a "practical program" (i.e., plenty of federal funds) to combat "the growing national recession." On Capitol Hill, Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson outlined a ten-point antirecession program that Senate Democrats were busy drafting. It called for more and faster federal spending for just about every variety of public work, even reached back to the Great Depression to include a stand-by WPA-type program. Cried Johnson's deputy majority leader, Montana's Mike Mansfield: "The question is just as much spuds as Sputniks."

Johnson's program did not include tax cuts, but Illinois' Paul Douglas, fresh from firsthand conversations with Chicago's unemployed, filled in the gap by hoppering a bill to trim personal income and excise taxes by $4.4 billion. Over in the House, Texas' Speaker Sam Rayburn, despite his own opposition to tax cuts, ordered lieutenants to get a tax-cut bill drafted in case the economy fails to pep up in early spring. And for all his confidence in ultimate prosperity, Richard Nixon put the Republicans within leaping distance of the tax-cut bandwagon. Said he: "If the choice is between a boondoggling public program on a massive scale and a tax cut, I for one would be for a tax cut. It would give an immediate impetus to the economy."

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