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Little TVAS, "... I recommended to the last session of the Congress the creation of seven planning regions, in which local people will originate and co-ordinate recommendations as to work of this kind to be done in their particular regions. The Congress will, of course, determine the projects to be selected within the budget limits."
Executive Reorganization."To carry out any Twentieth-Century program, we must give the executive branch of the Government Twentieth-Century machinery to work with. . . . For many years we have all known that the executive and administrative departments are a higgledy-piggledy patchwork of duplicate responsibilities and overlapping powers."
Wages and Hours. "A few more dollars a week in wages, a better distribution of jobs with a shorter working day will almost overnight make millions of our lowest-paid workers actual buyers of billions of dollars of industrial and farm products. That increased volume of sales ought to lessen other costs of production so much that even a considerable increase in labor costs can be absorbed without imposing higher prices on the consumer."
Anti-Trust Laws, "We have anti-trust laws, to be sure, but they have not been adequate to check the growth of many monopolies. Whether or not they might have been adequate originally, interpretation by the courts and the difficulties and delays of legal procedure have now definitely limited their effectiveness. We are already studying how to strengthen our anti-trust laws in order to end monopoly—not to hurt but to free legitimate business of the nation."
Busiest of the President's 50,000,000 listeners last week was his onetime aide, Hugh Johnson, who last month started a series of 15-minute broadcasts four times a week for Grove's Bromo Quinine, in addition to his daily Scripps-Howard column in which he has become one of the New Deal's sharpest critics. During the "fireside chat" Hugh Johnson took notes on what the President said. Three minutes after the chat was over, on the air at his usual time, he undertook to rebut some of his former chief's points with a promptness unprecedented for the radio. Speaking extemporaneously from his notes, he applauded the President's crop control program, warned that a continuation of New Deal spending and taxing would lead to a "distribution of poverty."
In his fireside chat the President approvingly quoted "one of the country's leading economists":*'"The continuance of business recovery in the United States depends far more upon business policies, business pricing policies, than it does on anything that may be done, or not done, in Washington.' "
"The high cost of living," ad libbed Hugh Johnson, "has depended for some time, and will continue to depend, more on what happens in Washington than on any other single cause in this country."
*First extra session convened March 9, 1933. the week after he took office. *Harvard Professor Oliver Mitchell Weni-vvorth Sprague, in an address before the New-York Chapter of the American Statistical Association, published last fortnight in the New-York Times'?, Annalist.