New Year for ECA

The appropriation for the second year of Paul Hoffman's ECA, which finances and administers the Marshall Plan, is still kicking around in committee. The bill is three months overdue for approval. It is about time for it to be passed.

The Marshall Plan was originally set up, as Paul Hoffman likes to say, "to get Europe on its feet and off our backs." It made U. S. products available to countries ordinarily unable to pay for them, hoping to build up these nations so that they could eventually resume normal trade relations with the U. S.

Seventeen European countries got together in Paris in July, 1947, worked out the machinery for the Marshall Plan, and decided how long U. S. aid might have to go on. The target date they picked was June, 1952.

They were wrong, even though the first year of Marshall aid produced a fine and eminently visible job in Europe. ECA money built steel mills in France, brought running water to hill towns in Italy, put ports back in business with hundreds of new cranes, and supplied more than half the bread for a whole group of major western European nations. It helped jump France's production to a figure slightly higher than the big boom year of 1928. But the Marshall Plan failed, as many people thought it would, to cut into Europe's basic economic troubles.

These troubles are, simply, that (1) Europe cannot produce as well and as efficiently as the U. S.; (2) As long as this technical backwardness continues, free trade between the continents is probably impossible. This is a reasonably short-run proposition; some day technological progress may put Europe very much back on its feet. But even ECA admits this day will not be in 1952.

The Marshall Plan should be kept working, however, for its political and humanitarian results are looking better and better. Standards of living have climbed in every country receiving U. S. aid. Unemployment has been falling. And ECA officials, who take a nice practical look at such things, balance high living standards and low unemployment against communism. There is very good evidence to back up the head of ECA's controller's office in Paris when he said "Marshall Plan-aid has reduced Communist pressure in every European country."

Mr. Hoffman and the Congress and the American people have a tough decision. The U. S. may have to continue paying out $4,000,000,000 a year for a plan which is failing in its original purpose. But the plan has also produced some results that should be very valuable for Europe's and our own economic and political security. The American people are going to have to be willing to continue shelling out if they want to preserve this security.