Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/65

Rh we are apt to fail to see the thing at all, our vision being so narrow and our reckonings so circumscribed and imperfect. Nevertheless it is simple enough to see that if a man fails to make adequate repairs to his house owing to his diversion to automobiling of the money that should have been spent on repairs the value of his house diminishes. In other words he has been enjoying his automobile at the expense of his principal.

Another man, who does not run an automobile, is unable to maintain his house properly for the reason that his income has failed to increase and he has not the means to pay for the necessary work at inflated prices. He is suffering loss of principal just the same as the man who is wasting directly, and while that is happening to him carpenters and bricklayers and plasterers are enjoying high living. There has been more deterioration of property in this way during the last five years than we commonly think. There is absolutely no way of measuring it in the aggregate. In my estimate of the national wealth at the end of 1920 I merely indicated the need for allowance on this account.

Of course the farmer, as a property owner, was bound to be a great sufferer in this way. Recently economists of the U. S. Department of Agriculture undertook to make an expression of this, asserting that American farmers, who have been making a large production with their physical equipment in a rundown condition, must within the next 10 years save up and reinvest in the farm plant from $8,000,000,000 to $10,000,000,000 of new capital, as a conservative estimate. The official report proceeds as follows:

For three years farmers have patiently patched, mended, repaired and used makeshifts. Sometime in the coming decade the farm must have