Statement by the President Upon Making Public the Second Interim Report of the Cabinet Committee on Price Stability for Economic Growth.
THE CABINET COMMITTEE on Price Stability for Economic Growth under the chairmanship of Vice President Nixon has submitted to me a Second Interim Report entitled "Prospects for Price Stability." I am making this Report public because it deals with matters of continuing importance to all Americans.
The Report is encouraging because it reveals the substantial progress we have made in checking inflation and in creating favorable prospects for price stability and healthy economic growth. But the Report gives no cause for complacency. Both government and the public must be constantly alert to these problems. We must continue to manage our monetary and fiscal affairs in a responsible manner; we must be firm, yet flexible, in adjusting public policies to promote economic expansion and to meet changing economic conditions; and we must preserve and strengthen the institutions of our free, competitive economy.
In the last analysis, sound public policies derive their strength from public understanding and public support. This Report, I believe, will help to enlarge that public understanding and broaden that support upon which the success of future efforts so largely rests.
Note: The report (20 pp., mimeographed) was released with the President's letter, together with the following summary by the Committee of its conclusions:
1. Inflation has been, and the threat of inflation will continue to be, a serious national problem.
2. We have the tools to curb inflation. On the whole, these tools have been used effectively during the past 8 years.
3. Most of the inflation that really hurts our old people and others on fixed incomes took place between the beginning of the Second World War and the end of the Korean War. Only 10 percent of the general price increase since 1939 has occurred since the Korean War.
4. It is not true that inflation stimulates economic growth. On the contrary, it creates waste, inefficiency, and hardship. It hurts our foreign markets, and it lessens the ability of American business to compete at home with imported goods.
5. While sound monetary and fiscal policies are the first line of defense against harmful increases in the price level, we cannot be complacent about cost increases springing from inefficiency and unsound practices of management, labor, or government.
6. Stability of the price level, though a necessary condition for the great expansion we expect in the 1960's, will not by itself assure economic growth. Growth requires research, imagination, initiative, thrift, constant efforts to increase efficiency, an improved investment climate, and vigilance in rooting out rigidities, whether governmental or private, that impede change in our economic system.
For the President's statement upon making public the first interim report, see the 1959 volume, this series, p. 484.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Statement by the President Upon Making Public the Second Interim Report of the Cabinet Committee on Price Stability for Economic Growth. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/234160