Secondly, I wanted a few weeks in which to set up the new
administrative organization and to see the first fruits of our
careful planning.
I think it will interest you if I set forth the fundamentals of
this planning for national recovery; and this I am very certain
will make it abundantly clear to you that all of the proposals and
all of the legislation since the fourth day of March have not been
just a collection of haphazard schemes but rather the orderly
component parts of a connected and logical whole.
Long before inauguration day I became convinced that individual
effort and local effort and even disjointed federal effort had
failed and of necessity would fail and, therefore, that a rounded
leadership by the federal government had become a necessity both of
theory and of fact. Such leadership, however, had its beginning in
preserving and strengthening the credit of the United States
government, because without that no leadership was a possibility.
For years the government had not lived within its income. The
immediate task was to bring our regular expenses within our
revenues. That has been done.
It may seem inconsistent for a government to cut down its regular
expenses and at the same time to borrow and to spend billions for
an emergency. But it is not inconsistent because a large portion of
the emergency money has been paid out in the form of sound loans
which will be repaid to the treasury over a period of years; and to
cover the rest of the emergency money we have imposed taxes to pay
the interest and the installments on that part of the debt.
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