Book of Numbers

When President Truman gave his 1951 budget to Congress last week, numerous anguished howls went up in all parts of the country, protesting the huge federal expenditures and bemoaning the arrival of the "welfare state." Now the Bureau of the Budget has prepared a painless 44-page booklet explaining the budget so that everyone can see what the howling is all about.

The pamphlet makes light reading. There are plenty of graphs and diagrams so that the prose is dispensable, and all sorts of interesting and important facts can easily be found.

For instance, the "welfare state" turns out to be a minor offender in the big 42.4 billion dollar total. National defense, foreign commitments, veterans' benefits, and payments on the national debt (nearly all results of the cold war or World War II) account for 71 percent of the budget. n 1939, the last "normal" year, these four made up only 29 percent of expenditures.

It may interest the constituents of certain Congressmen to discover that the allotment for "social welfare, health, and security" is the only one that is lower than it was 11 years ago. 3.9 billion dollars out of a 9 billion dollar budget went for welfare then, much of it in work programs to combat unemployment; the 1951 allotment is 2.7 billion dollars, mostly in aid to the aged, blind, and to dependent children.

The only things that jumped up appreciably in the 1951 budget are the appropriations for education and natural resources. The impetus for the first comes from the 300 million dollars for aid to education that the President hopes to get by Congress this session, while increased allocations for natural resources reflect the stepped-up program for atomic energy development.

If tax laws are not changed, the new budget is expected to run up a 5.1 billion dollar deficit to add to the quarter of a trillion dollars the government is paying interest on now. But the Congressmen who are demanding economy by abandonment of the "welfare" provisions will find that the new booklet readably belies much of their argument.