Democratic Claptrap

September 3, 1956

Is the Democratic platform really meant to be taken seriously? It is shrill, intemperate, long-winded, repetitious; a compound of abuse, half-truths, untruths, and glaring self-contradictions. It is a bid to buy the votes of every conceivable pressure group. It promises utter recklessness in spending the taxpayers’ money. If its framers had deliberately tried to write a parody of a political platform they could hardly have done better. The greatest danger of a Stevenson victory is not that he might repudiate his platform’s pledges, but that he might try to keep them.

Nothing is too bad for the platform framers to say about the Republican Administration. It seems that practically every measure it took has already proved “disastrous.” The Democrats alone, one gathers, know how to conduct foreign affairs. They alone “wrote humanity upon the statute books.” Republicans represent only “special privilege”—“government by the few, and for the few.” It is startling to discover in fact, that the American people “are now ruled by a government which they did not elect and to which they have not given their consent.” Who cast the 34 million votes for President Eisenhower becomes a baffling mystery.

PROSPERITY ‘MYTH’

It appears, also, that our present prosperity is no prosperity at all, but just another Republican myth. Our national income is at the highest figure on record. But one learns from the Democratic platform that the Republican Administration has “crippled and stunted” our economic growth. Wages are not only at the highest average level on record, but have raced far ahead of living costs. Yet we are informed by the Democratic platform that “wages lag.” And for some inscrutable reason (a will to political suicide?) there is a “Republican crusade against full prosperity.”

At any rate, present prosperity can’t compete with Democratic promises. Instead of the present picayune but record annual rate of $408 billion of gross national product, the Democratic platform promises “a $500 billion national economy in real terms”; an “increase of 20 percent or better in the average standard of living,” and an even bigger increase, through “special emphasis,” to families now making less than $2,000 a year. The platform promises. But space forbids even the barest list of its promises.

The platform is riddled with self-contradictions. It pledges “a truly balanced Federal budget.” How? By promising increased expenditures in a hundred directions to benefit every imaginable group. The platform repeatedly denounces the Republicans for “false economy” on national defense and for “political considerations of budget balancing.” All this would imply a huge increase in taxes to pay the higher expenditures. Instead, the platform promises “tax relief”—in particular by increasing the personal tax exemption of $600 “to a minimum of at least $800.” This alone would mean a loss of $4.5 billion in tax revenues.

MORE CONTRADICTIONS

But balancing the budget by simultaneously boosting expenditures and slashing taxes is no trick at all for the Democratic platform makers. They pledge themselves to “expand world trade” and “to support vigorously the Hull reciprocal-trade program.” And they propose to do this by preventing “serious economic injury” to anybody by any tariff cut and by continuing quotas on agricultural imports. They endorse the Marshall Plan and more economic assistance both to Israel and the Arab States. But they also tell us that “the time has come for a realistic reappraisal of the American foreign-aid program.” So every man must decide for himself whether the platform is for more foreign aid or for less.

The platform endorses states’ rights. But it insists that the Taft-Hartley Act must be repealed because it permits state “right to work” laws. The platform denounces corporate monopolies but is completely silent about industrywide labor monopolies. It deplores the fact that “American farmers have gone deeper and deeper into debt.” It proposes to cure this by providing “an increased reservoir of farm credit”—in other words, by encouraging them to get deeper into debt. And so on and on.

As for the Republican platform—but that is another column.