Out with the Plutogogues

To and fro in the almost empty Senate chamber shambled hulking, crag-faced Paul H. (for Howard) Douglas of Illinois, zestfully booming out the long jargon phrases of higher economics. White crew-cut hair bristling, Democrat Douglas last week was declaiming on an emerging issue in 1960 politicking: the state of the U.S. economy after seven years of Republican stewardship. Prompting his performance was his Joint Economic Committee's report on a year-long study of U.S. employment, growth and price levels.

Onetime Economics Professor Douglas (University of Chicago) gave his argument a semantic slant, turned his erudition on a recent newspaper charge that he is an economic demagogue. By a "process of semantic obfuscation," said he, "demagogue" had lost its original Greek meaning of "one who spoke for the people." Curiously, added Douglas, "while demagoguery is denounced as the worst evil, plutogoguery is not denounced." Douglas' definition of a "plutogogue": one using "unworthy arguments in support of the wealthy and the powerful." Concluded he: "A lot of arguments which masquerade under the term of 'fiscal responsibility' are plutogogic arguments, which conceal the reality."

Sluggish Growth. Clearly the Democrats were driving toward a broad attack on the economic issue. In the eyes of the Joint Economic Committee's indignant Democratic majority, the Eisenhower Administration's "neglect" of fiscal policy had seriously hurt the economy. The majority report rapped G.O.P. emphasis on "tight money" as an economic stabilizer, urged renewal of the Truman Administration's "easy money" policies. Credit restraint by the Republicans, charged the report, had not only failed to halt price upcreep but had also slowed the growth of the economy. Giving themselves the best of the Korean war boom, the Democrats contrasted a 4.6% yearly increase in the U.S. gross national product from 1947-53 to a sluggish 2.3% annual rate of increase since 1953. Within easy reach by Democratic reckoning: a sustained 4.5% annual growth rate.

The economy-stunting recessions of 1953-54 and 1957-58 were laid to clumsy Administration handling of defense cuts and refusal to use pump-priming tax reduction. As inflation-wary as the Administration, the Democrats were equally earnest about piling up big federal surpluses earmarked for reduction of the massive federal debt. Rising tax rates in boom time would retire federal debt, leave more funds for private borrowing, they held. Falling tax rates in time of slump would restore private buying power, bolstered by prompt expansion of federal spending on economy-reviving programs.

Scattershot Blasts. The Douglas committee's majority report, packed with economist's gobbledygook and lofty theory, was hardly suited for the political stump. But the Democratic Digest gave party spokesmen a free-swinging indictment of the Administration for use in handy quotation. Economic growth "under Eisenhower-Nixon has been miserably slow," trumpeted the Digest. What gains the country did achieve "have heavily favored the moneylenders as compared with farmers, small businessmen and workers." Republican "budget-first fiscal policies" have callously ignored the aged, the infirm, the unemployed, the farmers, the jammed schools and the blighted cities. To top it off, said the Democrats' official organ, the U.S. is "second best" in U.S.Soviet missile and space competition.

The Digest's scattergun criticism, the weighty economic report and Douglas' crusade against the plutogogues shattered any Republican dreams of coasting home in 1960 on the magic carpet of widely shared U.S. wellbeing. A major debate on the economy was abuilding; before it was ended, the G.O.P. might be hard pressed to prove that prosperity is more satisfying than Democratic promises.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.