President Truman, a good hand with figures, had almost all his arithmetic down cold for his mid-year budget review. To the 35 newsmen who gathered in the White House's steamy little cinema theater one day last week, he confidently rattled off how he expected the 1948 fiscal pie to be cut (see chart). By next June 30, he estimated, there would be a whopping $4.7 billion surplus.*
Poke. The President had some happy explaining to do. In the eight months since he sent Congress a "tight, hardboiled" budget (TIME, Jan. 20), the whizzing U.S. economy...
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