…Republican attitudes toward the social and economic innovations of the past seven years [of Roosevelt's New Deal] may have momentous consequences for the general welfare of the American people. It is important, therefore, that all socially minded citizens get a clear view of the policies which the Republican party will offer as an alternative to the New Deal….

The Republican Position

THE REPUBLICAN OFFENSIVE IS DIRECTED NOT AT THE SOCIAL objectives of the New Deal but at the economic measures by which the Roosevelt Administration has wooed recovery. Republicans refuse to admit that they are any less interested in social welfare than the adherents of the New Deal…There are, it is true, in the Republican ranks some diehards who hate the New Deal with such virulence that they would undo everything which has been done in the last seven years. They are, however,, relatively few in number and notably less vociferous than in 1936….

The great majority of Republicans are convinced that the country has been irrevocably committed to the essentials of the social program or the New Deal. It is impossible to tell how much of this attitude is due to genuine social enthusiasm, how much to regretful recognition of the inevitable. Most human conduct is a compound of free will and social compulsion.

The spearhead of the Republican attack is aimed at the spending, borrowing, taxing, and business regulating policies of the Roosevelt Administration. It vigorously assaults the New Deal position that the country has entered period of "mature" economy in which the opportunities for private investment and, consequently, employment in private industry will be much less than in the past….Candidate Dewey has made the defeatist attitude of the New Deal the theme of several speeches. He denies categorically and with evidential detail that "the American people are finished. America," he says, "is at the morning of its destiny."

Spending itself comes in for general denunciation. Candidate Vandenberg refers to it as "the wastrel theory that you can spend yourself into prosperity." Dewey rings the question home with the words, "The cost of a spendthrift government is paid by every man, woman and child in the country." It has been pointed out repeatedly by Republican candidates that a permanently unbalanced budget leads to "national bankruptcy, or repudiation or equally suicidal inflation. Candidate Taft emphasizes he social implications of continuing deficits: "Let no one say that a sound fiscal policy is too hardboiled toward the more unfortunate among our people. It is the poor who will be cared for by a solvent government. It is the poor who will suffer most when the government goes into bankruptcy." Republicans, however, uniformly make it known that they will balance the budget not by drastic and sudden cuts in relief or other expenditures, but by gradual reduction of spending combined with improved revenues as a result of better business.

Discouragement of investment in new enterprises by high taxation, destruction of confidence by deficit spending, manipulation of the currency, and unreasonable, vexatious and punitive regulation of business, account in current Republican philosophy for the prolongation of depression and unemployment….

Republican critics of the New Deal insist that the removal of the causes of continued depression and mass unemployment is the first task of any socially minded government. The social goals of the New Deal, they say, cannot be achieved under existing economic conditions. They contrast New Deal promises with—in Vandenberg's phrase—"the larger promise of real jobs at real wages through revived commerce."…