There is gold in the streets in 1946 and more people are in the nation's working force than ever before in the history of this up and down American Economy. Income payments, now at a level of $161 billion, have decreased less than expected thanks partially to the efforts of the unions in their recent wage campaigns. The press has attempted to arouse sympathy for the strike-beset businessman. The lack of such conspicuous items as automobiles (caused by other frictions of reconversion as well as by collective bargaining breakdowns) has obscured the realities of the boom. First-quarter reports on corporate profits, compiled by the Department of Commerce, revealed that in some industries, as the Department's "Survey of Current Business" (June, 1946) put it, "production and sales broke all previous records and, with the elimination of the excess profits tax and some reduction in other corporate levies, it was almost inevitable that net earnings would reach now highs."

The government economists were not the only prophets of boom. "Outlook," a Wall Street investment weekly, declares jubilantly: "Profits in prospect for industrial corporations generally over the next few years are likely to make 1929 and 1937 look small by comparison." While the big days of 1929 are being made to look small by today's high-profit businessmen, while rising prices increase profit margins and the swollen net profits of wartime are surpassed in the rush to "get yours," who will be thinking of that day several years from now when the seemingly inexhaustible consumer demand created by wartime shortages has dried up? When, in a few years, the reservoir of investment opportunity has been fully exploited, when the building boom dies from natural causes, when the consumer fever cools from surfeit or a shortage of cash, there will be a bust that will make 1929 look like a temporary recession.

Industrial leaders have barraged Washington with the claim that prices must rise to stimulate a "flood of production." This is a mere smokescreen of words thrown out by the highly-geared propaganda agency of the National Association of Manufacturers. Higher prices will not cure the labor and material shortages that set the limits of production today. Only reconversion time and labor-management peace can bring greater production. It was not the OPA, nor is it the Wagner Act, which is in need of revision. The revision of statutes most necessary now are revisions based on the recognition that millions of American families do not have a large enough annual income for a decent standard of living. To say nothing of buying the Fords that will keep Henry in business.

Myths and legends have been written about fat wartime wages and savings. These are being disproven by the reports, from the Federal Reserve Board and Bureau of Agricultural Economics showing that the rich got richer and the poor remained poor. One of every five families in 1945 had less than $1000 income; another group of more than one-fifth had less than $2000 income. Wartime savings are concentrated almost exclusively in families well above these income levels.

The paradox of poverty in the midst of riches, not Soviet Imperialism, is the real enemy of American democracy. The coming depression and mass joblessness, not labor union activity, is the threat to our freedom.