The Voice of Mexico (Mo.)

The fast-growing National Citizens' Committee to Curb Inflation, born in Mexico, Mo. (pop. 13,500) three months ago, marched into Washington for a rally last week, and it could hardly have picked a fitter time. Reason: last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that its retail price index had crept upward for the ninth month in a row, hitting a record peak of 119.6 (the 1947-49 average = 100) as compared with 115.4 a Year ago.

Founded by Missouri Apple Grower Paul C. Stark (father of the "victory garden" idea during World War II), the N.C.C.C.I, has a straightforward message: Washington should do its best to check inflation, but it is clearly up to the rest of the nation to help out with self-restraint. On that point Dwight Eisenhower fully agreed with Apple Grower Stark. Said Ike at his midweek press conference: "Government, no matter what its policies, cannot, of itself, make certain of the soundness of the dollar . . . There must be statesmanlike action, both by business and by labor."

Tricky Gadgets. Speakers at the N.C.C.C.I, rally stressed the point that much of the blame for inflation lies outside Washington. Said Ohio's Senator Frank J. Lausche: "Every citizen has a part to play in this fight against inflation." Inflation curbing, said Missouri's veteran Congressman Clarence Cannon, chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, "must begin at the grass roots." Economist Edwin G. Nourse, head of the President's Council of Economic Advisers under Harry Truman, rapped "tricky gadgets" of inflation, such as cost-of-living escalator clauses in union-management wage contracts. "We should stop passing the buck to [Washington]," urged Nourse. "The real source of inflation in the postwar U.S. has lain in the marketplace--in the institutions and practices of labor-union bargaining and corporation price administration."

Undented Defense. Democrats Lausche and Cannon put little or no blame for the current surge of price-spiraling on Dwight Eisenhower & Co. In the same nonpartisan spirit, a congressional subcommittee chaired by Arkansas' Congressman Wilbur D. Mills unanimously concluded last week that the Administration had done right in backing up the Federal Reserve Board's inflation-fighting tight-money policy of bridling bank credit. Reported the committee, after interviewing three dozen experts: tight money pinches, but it restrains inflation--and inflation pinches harder and more unjustly.

The Mills report blunted the politicking efforts by Senate Finance Committee Democrats--especially Oklahoma's Democratic Oilman-Senator Robert S. Kerr--to brand the tight-money policy as a national calamity. In questioning Treasury Secretary George M. Humphrey on Capitol Hill last week, Kerr nagged and niggled for three days without denting Humphrey's basic defense. The Secretary admitted that tight money had pained some borrowers and would-be borrowers. He also admitted that high interest rates had upped the cost of carrying the national debt. But he would not be swerved from his (and the Mills reports') essential point: "It is better to have the cost of interest rising than to have the cost of living going out of sight."

Noting that business expansion slacked off and raw materials shortages eased during the first half of 1957, Humphrey ventured that inflation might ease during the year's second half. But before week's end, the day after the President appealed for "statesmanlike action," Pittsburgh's giant U.S. Steel Corp. announced inflationary price boosts averaging $6 a ton (see BUSINESS). To halt the price index's upward creep, Washington was going to need some help from Pittsburgh (Pa.)--as well as Mexico (Mo.).

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