FORGET ABOUT DEBTS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3400, 30 July 1932, Page 4 (Supplement)

FORGET ABOUT DEBTS

AMERICAN OPINIONS DIFFER. Ex-Governor Alfred Smith, in a speech at a Jefferson Day dinner, said:— Let us tell the European nations who owe us money to forget all about it for twenty years, and chat we will write off as paid each year 25 per cent of the gross value of the American products they buy from us. This, in effect, is telling a debtor nation that if it buys 100,000,000 dollars worth of our cotton we will forget 25,000,000 dollars worth of its debt. If it buys 100,000,000 dollars worth of our wheat, fruit, or manufactured products we will forget 25,000,000 dollars of its indebtedness. We have strangled trade by holding debts over their heads, and then raising a tariff wall which shuts out their products, and our wheat is rotting on the farms while other nations starve.

On the following day Senator Borah made an attack on Mr Al. Smith’s proposal. If Europe, he said, cannot solve the reparations problem it is useless to talk to the American taxpayer about aiding Europe by cancelling debts. Until the fundamental questions which inhere in the European situation can be adjusted, it is not within the power of the United States, however liberal and generous its policy may be, to reanimate Europe.