Betrayal?

With the U.S. Government running into the red at the rate of $10,000 a minute, gaunt, grey Economist Edwin G. Nourse last week issued a stern warning. Said President Truman's former chief economic adviser: the Administration's reckless spending under its "pie in the sky" philosophy would, unless checked by tough-minded slashes, lead to "strain and possible breakdown" of the U.S. economy by 1951.

Herman W. Steinkraus, Connecticut manufacturer (Bridgeport Brass Co.) and president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, saw the same danger. "Every group is pressing on Washington to get more, more, more," said Steinkraus at a Cincinnati luncheon . . . "If we keep on this spending spree at the rate we are going . . . our tax burden will become well-nigh intolerable." The nation, he added, is "very near that point which economists refer to as the 'peril point.'"

But nobody struck at red-ink budgeting harder than General Electric's big-fisted President Charles E. Wilson. "No one in the seat of authority in our Government has yet shown any real intention of paying off [the debt]," said Wilson at a dinner in Philadelphia. Wilson called such negligence a "shameful dereliction to duty and immoral administrative betrayal of a great economic system." He agreed with President Truman that the U.S. national income might well reach $300 billion in five years, but added: "We must take care that we are still dealing in dollars at the end of five years, and not in cigar coupons . . . We have had enough pretty words, enough vague promises to do better next year or next decade, enough planned devaluation of sound money, enough economic confusion . . . in short, we have had enough . . . We must . . . turn the tide of waste, extravagance and moral dishonesty which today characterizes the deliberate and calculated fiscal policy of this Government."