REPUBLICANS: Kansas Candidate

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Kansas finances rest on three main props: 1) the Tax Limitation Act, restricting local taxing bodies to a maximum levy for any one purpose and to a maximum total; 2) the Budget Law, requiring local governments to publish their budgets in advance, hold public hearings; 3) the Cash Basis Law which limits every locality to pay-as-you-go spending. The last is a Landon measure. The first two were initiated by Democratic Governor Woodring. Governor Landon has stuck to the law's letter. But the enormous myth which GOPartisans have made of his budget-balancing feat may be finally debunked by reflection on the probable state of Kansas' finances if the Federal budget had been balanced since 1933, thus depriving dust, drought and Depression-stricken Kansas of the $400,000,000 of Federal money which has poured in from such sources as RFC, HOLC and FCA loans, AAA checks and Relief.

Alf Landon has shrewdly avoided offering specific answers to national problems. His rare speeches to date have been to the effect that it would be nice to attain many New Deal goals without New Deal spending and experiment. "No reasonable citizen should ask us what to do," cried he in his second broadside at the New Deal last winter. "The American people propose to solve their problems under the American system."

In his well-rehearsed radio interview last week, Candidate Landon uttered his boldest words to date, took the following stands on issues of the day:

¶The Republican Campaign: The Republican Party must proceed along sound and progressive lines. . . . Progressive government . . . can succeed only when accompanied by careful preparation, competent administration and sound fiscal policies.

¶Labor and Agriculture: Where labor or agriculture are under disadvantages these must be removed.

¶Youth: What the young people of America really need and earnestly desire is not relief but opportunity.

¶Foreign Policy: It might repay all of us to read Washington's Farewell Address again.

¶Government & Business: There should be regulation wherever regulation keeps open opportunity and protects, not hampers, the people as a whole in the exercise of their rights. ... I believe we have got to attack the evils of monopoly frankly and resolutely. . . .

¶Social Security: I am for it but . . .

¶Relief: When we have the facts, we must provide an honest and effective system, administered so that the money will go to those who need it and deserve it, free from political restriction.

With these views, spoken in an honest, cracker-barrel voice which showed that Alf Landon's efforts to improve his strident, monotonous radio delivery have brought results, hardly a citizen, from President Roosevelt down, could well differ. Nor could they disagree with another remark of Governor Landon's in the course of his interview: "Good intentions are not enough."