BELGIUM: Two-Year Plan

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With King Albert presiding, Belgium's Cabinet lately approved a two-year plan of national retrenchment. What they think of this plan sturdy Belgians showed last week by oversubscribing a one-billion-franc internal loan offered by the Government to the public at 5%. Capitalists to the core, thousands of Belgian petite bourgeoisie organized tiny pools, each pool buying one bond.

Success of the two-year plan is predicated on retrenchments all along the Government line. Leading the way as usual, beloved King Albert reduced his own civil list (royal wages) 15%, but insisted that the pay of other Government employes be cut only 10%.

Many Belgian taxes have been upped 10% for the next two years, a few 15%. Each Belgian Cabinet Minister, moreover, was instructed last week to spend only 85% of the sum appropriated to run his department. He is expected to "save money" for King & Country.

In Brussels, capitalist Belgians who hate & fear the Soviet "FiveYear Plan," referred to their own two-year plan last week as a "program of economy," deplored the term "two-year plan," insisted that it is just the ordinary Belgian way of budgeting economies, deserves no special name.

A five-year plan was the sentence of five years in jail imposed by a Belgian court on one Fernando de Rosa who shot at but missed Italian Crown Prince Umberto when he came a-courting to Belgium (TIME, Nov. 4, 1929). Last week King Albert pardoned Shooter de Rosa who has been in jail two and a half years. Unofficially both the Belgian Court and the Italian Court announced that King Albert exercised his power of pardon by request of his son-in-law, Crown Prince Umberto. H. R. H. and his buxom Belgian wife (Princess Marie José) now live in an ornate, expensively refurbished palace at Naples.