Newspapers / Jones County Journal (Trenton, … / Aug. 11, 1966, edition 1 / Page 2
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'Hang on for the real action, man!’ 3| + ..s V'S EDITORIALS Never Forget That These Editorials Are The Opinion Of One Man --And He May Be Wrong Misguided Concern Nothing is more ridiculous than th< Presidential and congressional concear over labor unions and industry causing inflation. The direct and total cause of runaway inflation is the federal government. The unbelievable waste of every facet of federal government contributes more to the cause of inflation than the com bined efforts of every private citizens it the nation. One has to look no further than hi! own home county ta see waste piled on top of waste. In North Carolina the fed eral education program has added near ly 10,000 more highly paid drones to the taxpayers’ back. This means a half a million in the na tion. The War on Poverty is succeeding only in making the taxpayer poorer. Medicare added roughly 30 per cent to the sooial security tax paid by every working person in the nation. Now it is boosting medicare costs. The space program costs every taxpay ing American a huge slice of every pay check. The monstrous waste of men, money and materials in Viet Nam is i just ob« move reason for galloping in i flatten. Federal highway programs, federal ir rigation projects, federal slum clearance, federal waterways, federal power pro jects, federal parks, federal underwrit ing of civil rights rioting are each and all a part of this thing that makes the dollar have a lesser value every time the clock ticks. But the whining of The Great Hush puppy and his litter of whelps in con gress would have us gullibly accept the utterly wrong premise that the big bad wolf in the inflation woodpile is the working man and the private business man. Unfortunately and almost unbeliev ably a vast majority of us swallow just such drivel, which, after all, may be the very best reaso* one can find to insist that the Number One need in our na tion today is better education. Since it is more than apparent that very few of us have sufficient education or common sense to recognize unadult erated horse manure when it is thrown in our face. The Way We Are Headed "The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of politi cal and economic opportunists."—Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is gone but his cynical clairvoyance has a pertinence every Am erican voter should consider, since these exact acts of opportunists are heading our country down the certain path to economic chaos, which leads to the an archy in the streets in which civilization i> threatened.. We flatter ourselves wrongly that this n to us, the mid-20th cen tury sophisticates who have aH kinds of to prevent utter collapse of if ^ | ' ih', few intelligent things Sen Morse has said recently is ttpport labor unions the American econ most basic thing of ant still claim. - The super-civilized Germans turned to the mad excesses of Hitlerism as a direct result of financial collapse. The generally talkative French turned to the guillotine when their bellies got empty. Political ideals had nothing to do with the Russian revolution, nor with the more recent Chinese revolution. 'In each instance economic collapse, wide spread privation and selfish ery were mixed with liberal portions of demagoguery to stir the natives up to savageries that the survivors still find difficult to understand. t I Manners or Politics? ' The question answers itself when one poses: Is it manners or politics causing President Johnson to defer to congress and congress to defer to the president in the airline strike hot-potato passing. Neither wishes to pull the tail feathers out of any union fowl, and so most graciously each is trying to let the other have the “honor." Perhaps more importantly to both than the personal politics involved is the cold realization that neither can really do anything about the comer into which they have painted themselves. As we have said repeatedly on this page: The technological complex into which we have been launched in the past few years places the economy at the mercy of an endless list of “vital” ser vices. And this puts the nation at the mercy of those who operate these “vital” services. But when a penetrating look is taken at these utterly “vital” services we find frequently that the world keeps on turn- i ing and aside from minor inconvenience “progress” continues, and even without such services. There are people in congress capable j of understanding this as well as we, ! and such unalterable truisms cannot f avoid penetrating some levels of the White House hierarchy. So what is all the clamor about? Certainly not about the sacred right of labor to strike, nor the equally sacred right of management to resist strikers. So it has to be about such mundane things as political expediency and per sonal annoyance. The president has his private planes and helicopters to flit about in but poor, overpaid congressmen have to catch military planes or fly on com mercial craft to mend their political fences and personal fortunes. So they want their “toy” baek, but like other spoiled brats who tear up such toys, they don’t know how to put “Humpty-Dumpty” back together again. There is small relief in reviewing the scattering of 122 billion of the Ameri can taxpayers’ dollars around the world in the name of “foreign aid” in the past 21 years. First of the panhandling nations in line is oar “friend” France, which has snatched 99,410,000,000 out of the Amer ican economy. Second is England — now hauling war supplies to help kill our boys in Viet Nam, which has pocketed 99,085,000,000 of our money. Most astounding is the third beggar nation on thi6 list: Korea, which has gobbled at the rate of $6,650,000,000 — billions, that is — from the empty pockets of stupid Americans. American money has created more multi-millionaires in the corrupt Korean hierarchy than anywhere else in the world. A new nation of just over 25 mil lion people has been given more than six billion dollars. But the vast majority of those billions has never reached the vast majority of - this. tiny population. Huge slices of it are in Swiss banks in 1 the estates of such “patriots” as the 1 late Syngman Rhee, who left behind : the world’s richest widow, thanks to American stupidity. Equally as wasteful has been the $4, 900,000,000 lavished on the nearly 12 million people of the Chinese govern- 1 ment in exile. Here again the Soong family, which includes Madame Chiang Kai-shek, are among the world’s few ! billionaire families, courtesy of United States taxpayers. To the gentle Germanfolk who slaughtered several hundred thousand American boys between 1941 and 1945 we have turned the other cheek and our bank book with free will offerings of , who stabbed our nation and decency in the hart, we have opened the Am Avtfaori iavnovar^fl nnr>lraf tn fit a funo a# Some Thanks • the simperingly polite Nipponese, The fiscal year ending June 30, 1966 was a banner year for North Carolina, and especially for Lenoir County. Total retail sales in the state amounted to $8,548,507,666 and in Lenoir County tot al retail sales pushed close to the 100 million-dollar mark with $97,596,793 running through the county’s cadi reg isters. • . Even in the inflated tunes of today a hundred thUlion dollars is a lot of money, and especially for so small a county as Lenoir. But there is an amus ing as well as an amazing side to the spending of so much money in such a small-village community as Lenoir. To me that amusement comes from the fact that far and away the biggest part of this spending was done for and >n motor vehicles. Car purchases amount ed to $10,075,634 and automotive sup plies took a staggering $18,898,357. In the county more was spent for the care and feeding of cars than was spent on feeding the people of the county. Grocery buying accounted for $18,669, 505 in total retail sales. And this same ratio exists all across the state. Under the automotive group ing for the state as a whole $1,466,728, 259 was spent out of that $8.5 billion total sales in the state, and this added to the $872,248,032 from new car sales pushed the total on all points for the gas buggy to just over $2.3 billion, or plightly more than 25 per cent of all spent in the state for the year just end ea. So the car remains a blessing, yet a curse. It takes most of our money, gob bles up millions of acres of our best land, slays close to 50,000 of us each year, maims and injures another three million and costs us in medical and lost time bills nearly five billion dollars per year. But this monster is a gentle servant that whisks us to far away places with strange sounding names; to the bedside of sick friends, to entertainments, to the four corners of our hemisphere with i lot of money and a little luck. Someday this monster will have to be muzzled in more ways than (me. Al ready his foul breath has polluted al most beyond living the air of many ma jor cities. The mangled bodies of these lead monsters litter our highways and iesecrate every esthetic sense. Perhaps an electric car to alleviate the Halitosis of this gas-burning monster is lot so far away as one might dream. Nor a plastic car that has a minimum >f metal parts so that when its life span s ended a brief cremation will leave >nly a handful of ashes where today the residue is mountainous. Change, and improvement are vital, rnd they will come because when a lation so huge, so rich and so dedicated x> rapid transit demands such changes he engineers will be ready, willing and ible to supply the demand. Already the petrbieum industry has i bad case of jitter# everytime its lead :rs return from a'rgolf couase where hey have ridden about in silent, un polluted air astride an economical to mild, economical to operate electrical *o-cart. - This is a cloud no bigger than the lation’s golf courses today which is rasting a long, long shadow across a jreat many of our major industries. It vould appear that investments in elec xical utilities stocks are now a better ong-range risk than in even the most pit-edged oil stocks. 'Mister Anonymous' )ear Mr. Editor; I though self-reliance was part of he practiced Boy Scout Creed. Asking tor money from the United Fund does lot seem self-reliant. IS this a contra-, liction of terms or principle? If there is something I don’t under itwrtwouid you, Mr. Editor, explain. .
Jones County Journal (Trenton, N.C.)
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Aug. 11, 1966, edition 1
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