We are now spending, solely for war purposes, the sum of about one hundred million dollars every day in the week.
FDR
The Public Record
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States, serving from March 4, 1933, until his death on April 12, 1945. A member of the Democratic Party, he was born in New York and is best known for his leadership during two of the most significant crises in American history: the Great Depression and World War II. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, a series of programs and reforms aimed at economic recovery and social welfare, which fundamentally reshaped the role of the federal government in American life.
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But, before this year is over, that almost unbelievable rate of expenditure will be doubled.
But the spending of these tremendous sums presents grave danger of disaster to our national economy.
When your government continues to spend these unprecedented sums for munitions month by month and year by year, that money goes into the pocketbooks and bank accounts of the people of the United States.
You do not have to be a professor of mathematics or economics to see that if people with plenty of cash start bidding against each other for scarce goods, the price of those goods goes up.
First. we must, through heavier taxes, keep personal and corporate profits at a low reasonable rate.
We must ration all essential commodities which are scarce.
We must discourage installment buying, and encourage paying off debts and mortgages.
Some people are already taking the position that every one of the seven points is correct except the one point which steps on their own individual toes.
Well, your profits are going to be cut down to a reasonably low level by taxation.
Indeed in these days, when every available dollar should go to the war effort, I do not think that any American citizen should have a net income in excess of $25,000 per year after payment of taxes.
Ceilings are being placed on the prices at which you can sell your goods or rent your property.
You will have to forego higher wages for your particular job for the duration of the war.
Because we must put every dime and every dollar we can possibly spare out of our earnings into war bonds and stamps.
Because the demands of the war effort require the rationing of goods of which there is not enough to go around.
When, at the end of this great struggle we shall have saved our free way of life, we shall have made no "sacrifice.
Ask the workers of France and Norway and the Netherlands, whipped to labor by the lash, whether the stabilization of wages is too great a "sacrifice.
Ask the businessmen of Europe, whose enterprises have been stolen from their owners, whether the limitation of profits and personal incomes is too great a "sacrifice.
Ask the women and children whom Hitler is starving whether the rationing of tires and gasoline and sugar is too great a "sacrifice.
It must not be impeded by those who put their own selfish interests above the interests of the nation.
It must not be impeded by self-styled experts either in economics or military problems who know neither true figures nor geography itself.
It must not be impeded by a few bogus patriots who use the sacred freedom of the press to echo the sentiments of the propagandists in Tokyo and Berlin.
And, above all, it shall not be imperiled by the handful of noisy traitors--betrayers of America, betrayers of Christianity itself-- would-be dictators who in their hearts and souls have yielded to Hitlerism and would have this Republic do…
I know that they will gladly embrace this economy and equality of sacrifice, satisfied that it is necessary for the most vital and compelling motive in all their lives--winning through to victory.
Never in the memory of man has there been a war in which the courage, the endurance and the loyalty of civilians played so vital a part.
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