January 3, 1955

January 2, 1956

The present proposals for still larger farm subsidies at the expense of the taxpayers are one more example of how Federal spending programs, no matter how huge or how harmful, tend to grow even greater.

January 7, 1957

On Oct. 22, Elliott V. Bell, editor of Business Week, made a speech before the American Bankers Association which deserved and has received much attention, not because it contained anything new, but because it supported, in an unusually lucid and plausible form, increasingly popular Keynesian theories concerning who should manage our managed money, and how. These theories lead in practice to a philosophy of perpetual inflation.

January 6, 1958

With the present missile scare and deflation scare, the outlook for government economy is even dimmer than it was a year ago. The main hope of those who would like to see the Federal budget under some sort of responsible control lies in reforming the budget-making process itself. An opportunity exists in the very fact that Congress will probably be asked to raise the debt ceiling again. If Congress feels forced to do this, it can and should exact a price.

January 5, 1959

The “national income approach,” once part of the abracadabra of a few statisticians, has now become so widely popularized, not only in economic textbooks but in newspaper discussions, that almost anyone is likely to ask you, or tell you, what “GNP” (gross national product, for the still benighted) is going to be for 1959. Yet a close examination does not justify the exaggerated reliance now placed on these figures. At least five major cautions ought to be kept in mind. Here are two of them: