Word: leon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Leon Henderson was fighting mad last week and showed it as only Leon can. He even threatened to quit as price tsar...
Last week the subsidy question was all tangled up with patronage. Congress was in a rage because Leon had tried to be nonpolitical with his OPA appointments-the biggest potential patronage pool the U.S. has seen in years. To "discipline" him Congress got set to slash his $161,000,000 budget to finance his price-control army. It had also refused to authorize subsidies for any price-ceiling casualties except primary producers (like farmers). And it had refused to vote any money at all for any kind of price-ceiling subsidy...
...Leon Henderson, no farm-price control plus no wage control plus insufficient taxes leaves nothing but subsidies to hold the retail price line. Both Canada and Britain have paid subsidies in cases where retail ceilings imposed hardships so extreme that they could not be shoved back on the wholesaler or manufacturer. Canada's payments have been trifling, but in Britain two years of price control have cost more than $1,000,000,000 in subsidies, and Britain regards it as money well spent to avoid a far more costly general increase in prices...
Even that kind of money is chicken feed to what the U.S. will probably have to dish out to keep ceilings fixed. The $1,000,000,000 figure Senator Brown foresaw last week was just a starter; and if $1,000,000,000 sounds high, Leon Henderson had some stratospheric statistics to justify it: price control, he contended, has already saved the U.S. $6 billion on war expenditures; if the ceilings hold for another 20 months, the U.S. will pay $62 billions less for its war than it would if prices rose as they did in World...
Harried Henderson got a good lick in last week when he told his press conference that he was worrying "about how to keep the cost of living stabilized and not how to keep Leon and his faithful associated 'bureaucrats' in their jobs." Whether he would really carry out his threat to martyr himself to save his ceilings was still a moot question. If Congress makes his resignation the price of a subsidy bill, he may have to follow through. On the other hand, as he cagily mentioned last week, "A lot of personalities are being chewed up around...