How Much Is Enough?

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When President Truman last week asked Congress for a system of "loan guarantees" to step up "essential production," many a U.S. steelmaker guessed that he was reviving a plan that Congress had rejected last year. That plan was for Government-enforced expansion of the steel industry (TIME, Jan. 17, 1949).

To forestall it, steelmen renewed their insistence that the industry was already expanding more than enough to handle all war demands. The American Iron & Steel

Institute trotted out figures to show that in the last 3½ years the industry, financing its own expansion out of profits, had built about $2 billion of new facilities, boosted the nation's total steel capacity from 91.2 million tons to 100.5 million tons a year. Moreover, the industry was in the midst of new expansions which by the end of 1952 would raise capacity to 105 million tons. Example: last week U.S. Steel Corp. announced plans to add 1,660,000 tons of capacity to its existing facilities and build a new mill near Trenton, N.J. which will add 700,000 tons more, a total boost of 2,360,000 tons.

Even at present capacity, Republic Steel's President Charles M. White pointed out last week, the U.S. industry's annual capacity was "13 million tons greater than that of all the rest of the world combined in 1949 and 11 million tons greater than was required in 1944, the biggest production year in World War II."