Word: billion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...nation got a sharp warning. A joint congressional committee of tax experts estimated last week that at the present rate of income and outgo, the U.S. would be in the red another $3 billion by next year. Such big round numbers had lost their ability to shock, the government was already $252 billion in debt. But one fact could be understood. If even in prosperous peacetime a government did not keep out of the red, then it was playing with economic dynamite...
Washington debated: what to do? With almost monolithic stubbornness, Harry Truman still insisted that the thing to do was to boost taxes $4 billion. Apparently almost no one in Congress agreed with him. The most notable dissent last week came from a New Dealing liberal, Illinois' greying freshman Senator Paul Douglas, onetime professor of economics...
...proposed instead that the government "fry out the fat" in its system. He thought the government could reduce $30 billion of its expenditures by some 6% without injuring its services. "Is there not at least this amount of fat and excess in the government as a whole?" he asked. "Can anyone really deny this? What we know as men, we cannot pretend ignorance of as Senators...
...years, the Deputies of the Big Four Foreign Ministers have been deadlocked on the question of precisely what constitutes German assets; the Russians, for example, include in their definition properties which the Nazis seized from the Austrians after the Anschluss. The Big Four might interminably haggle over half a billion dollars' worth of factories, oilfields and Danube River shipping, but all the competent authorities were agreed on one fact: Herr Kaiser's three rings seemed to be German assets, all right. Frau Feix was informed that she must not sell them without written permission from the Allied Commission...
This article informed us that "Chiang has received more than three billion dollars from the U.S., much of it in actual war material. Still his armies have melted before Mao's Communists. The reason is obvious incompetent leadership, corruption, and lack of popular support." I suggest that the moral forces that overcame Chiang were very real indeed; but methinks these "moral forces" have taken up more than a little space on the Kremlin-to-China trade route...