Abc-Chester Bowles

You don't need a high-powered course in economics to tell you that when your cost of living rises your standard of living automatically goes down. What happens to the cost of living directly affects the paycheck that the head of your family brings home each week and the value of your savings and your bonds?

So the question what about our cost of living is an important one for every American and that's the subject Chester Bowe's Stabilization director is going to discuss in his transcribed talk this week. Mr. Bowe's Hello, everybody.

The other evening out of our house in Virginia we had a visitor from back home in Connecticut, and as usually happens it wasn't long before we found ourselves talking about prices and rent control, and especially what's been happening to the cost of living in recent years.

Our Connecticut friend was particularly anxious to know what's likely to happen to prices and rents in the months ahead. Sometimes I felt that you and your family would also be interested. I thought I'd talk about this subject today.

Clearly the cost of living has gone up since Hitler invaded Poland way back in 1939, and has gone up a lot more than either you or I would like. But we can be thankful for one thing at least.

So far we're in a whole lot better shape than we were in the similar period of World War No. 1. Under the price and rent controls, which have been in effect since the winter of 1942, prices and rents have risen only about one-third as much as they did in the disastrous inflation of the last war.

Let's first of all see what happened then. At the end of the last war, when the armistice came in November 1918, prices already were 62% higher than at the start of the war. But unfortunately the increase in prices didn't stop there.