For the first time since the fiscal year 1930 the Budget for the next
fiscal year will require no increase in the national debt.
Expenditures of all kinds, authorized and recommended, in the next year are
estimated at just above 35.8 billion dollars. Net receipts are estimated at
31.5 billion dollars. The estimated difference of 4.3 billion dollars will
be met by a reduction in the very substantial balance which will be in the
Treasury during the next fiscal year.
A large part of the activities outside defense and war liquidation,
aftermath of war, and international finance, classified as "other
activities" in a following table, is still due to repercussions of the war.
These "other activities" include more than 2 billion dollars for aids to
agriculture and net outlays for the Commodity Credit Corporation-almost
double the expenditures for the same purposes in prewar years. This
increase is due mainly to expenditures for purposes of price stabilization
and price support resulting from the war food production program. Other
increases in this category are due to the fact that certain wartime
agencies now in the process of liquidation are included in this group of
activities. If all expenditures for those activities which are directly or
indirectly related to the war are excluded, the residual expenditures are
below those for corresponding activities in prewar years. In making this
comparison account should be taken of the fact that, while prewar
expenditures were affected by direct relief and work relief for the
unemployed, the postwar budgets are affected by the considerable increase
in pay rates and other increases in costs and prices.
To elaborate, the Budget, as I have remarked above, reflects on both sides
of the ledger the Government's program as recommended by the Executive. It
includes estimates not only of expenditures and receipts for which
legislative authority already exists, but also of expenditures and receipts
for which authorization is recommended.
The Budget total for the next fiscal year, the year that ends on June 30,
1947, is estimated at just above 35.8 billion dollars-about a third of the
budgets for global war, although nearly four times the prewar budgets. This
estimate is based on the assumption that a rapid liquidation of the war
program will be associated with rapid reconversion and expansion of
peacetime production. The total includes net outlays of Government
corporations.
The estimated expenditures in the next and current fiscal year compare as
follows with those of a year of global war and a prewar year: