Dear Paul:1 I read your study carefully and then sent it to George Humphrey for comment.2 I will be interested in his reaction.
Fundamentally, there is now going on in our country a great struggle between two schools of thought. One holds that, regardless of reasons, government is spending far too much money, requiring a taxation rate that is unbearable and not consistent with the need for accumulating capital to provide new jobs. This particular school stoutly maintains that all government spending should be curtailed on the theory that if carried on at the present rate, we are certain to end up with a controlled economy--some form of socialism. Consequently we would lose what we are trying to defend.3
The other school of thought maintains that this is a very critical time in the world's political history and that if we fail to do all those things which will tend to bind the free world more tightly together in firm opposition to Communistic effort, we will eventually be destroyed. All the defense experts belong to this school, as do countless others. However, this particular group is divided into two parts. On the one hand are those who want to put a lot of extra money in the organisms of war; the other is a school that wants to spend more and more for humanitarian reasons both at home and abroad.4
A day or so ago the President of the United States Rubber Company--for the moment his name slips my mind--made a speech representative of the thinking of the economy-minded boys. It was a bitter speech, charging the Administration with outdoing the New Dealers in the spending of people's money and so on and so on.5
Frankly, I classify myself with those that oppose the kind of government spending in which we are now indulging, but I get very tired of reading such criticisms when they are, at the same time, barren of specific recommendations as to where appropriations should be cut. Our money goes for interest on the public debt, for veterans, for farmers, for a myriad of grants-in-aid to States for humanitarian purposes, and for aid to other nations. Aside from this, almost the whole goes into security activities.
Politically the critics seem to be afraid to tackle the farmers, the veterans and the welfare activities--but they are frightened to suggest real cuts in the defensive arrangements. So they have only one target--"foreign aid."
You and I have been over this subject time after time.6 We are agreed that there is much short-sightedness and a deal of demagoguery apparent in the attitudes of "isolationists." But the fact is that people engage in demagoguery only when they think their words will be publicly acclaimed.
So--we must:
(a) Be sound, sensible and clear in every proposal we make.
(b) Organize to show the people of the United States how sound and sensible investment in foreign economies helps us both in the short-term and in the long-term sense.
(c) Do the same to show how such expenditures increase our national security and the prospects of peace more than do excessive expenditures on armaments.
(d) Avoid useless or wasteful foreign expenditures like the plague.
(e) Have the courage to postpone desirable, but not immediately necessary, projects until implementation does not tend to push up prices in a tight money market.7
For everything we do, we must have broad, simple, easily understood plans. The whole problem is complicated by needless difficulties in the international world. For example, the recent closing of the Canal and the blowing up of the pipe lines across Syria have imposed upon us great burdens. Knowing that to allow the British pound to deteriorate markedly would endanger the economy of the free world, we have had to do the things necessary to bolster it. It is a real burden; and the whole affair need never have happened.8
At the same time we, with large military commitments abroad, have to keep large forces and to make great expenditures in Europe, an area which because of its population, culture and intellectual level of its people, should now need no help from abroad.
There are many other instances where it would appear that with better cooperation in the world, needless expenditures could be cut down and make greater amounts available for constructive purposes.
What I am trying to say is that both at home and abroad political and emotional factors often play too large a part in complicated problems where fact, logic and good sense should be controlling.
That is enough of all this--most of it you have studied over and over again.9
With warm regard, As ever
