It is interesting in passing to compare the air-mail deficit with others submitted by the Postmaster General: penny postcards, $57,000,000; fourth-class mail, $82,000,000; third-class mail, $139,000,000; and second-class mail, $237,000,000—a total of $515,000,000. And so the air-mail deficit is but one of many and the least of them all. On the basis of such approximations as have been presented by government agencies, the airlines might have argued that by absorbing a portion of the vast overhead of the Post Office Department they were actually “subsidizing” other types of mail service. In light of the dearth of figures that would indicate an approximation to the true air-mail subsidy, if any, Carleton Putnam, of Chicago and Southern, made an exhaustive analysis of government cost records, during which he checked his assumptions with responsible persons in the government. This indicated that from the inception of the air mail down to the year 1948, the postal revenues had exceeded the added costs of air mail to the Post Office by some $54,000,000. Summing up for the Committee, in a statement which was not challenged by the government, he testified, “Hence the American taxpayer has not only gained the greatest air transportation system on earth ... plus an adjunct to the national defense which would otherwise have cost him untold millions to provide—he is $54,000,000 ahead in cash as well.” And after charging the airlines for their share of the cost of building and maintaining the nation’s airways and airports, an expenditure which would in any case have had to be made for the Army and Navy, the airlines would still owe the taxpayer but $61,000,000, all of which relates to maintaining the national airways system. Furthermore this clear demonstration that the air mail has not been subsidized comes in the face of grievous blunders by the Civil Aeronautics Board in certifying uneconomic competing services at extravagant mail rates. One of the most extreme cases of this kind was reported by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker. The Civil Aeronautics Board had in the past two years certified twenty-one “feeder lines,” some of which had been authorized to divert mail poundage from some stations which Eastern had served for twenty years without subsidy, and to charge ten times as much to transport the same mail between the same points. In other words, the Civil Aeronautics Board, impelled by some sense of political necessity to provide competition for the major airlines, had in effect forced them to subsidize competition for themselves. Meanwhile the government had paid such niggardly rates to others that the stockholders of the enterprises had been forced to subsidize the United States. Such “reasonable” regulation had reduced the airlines from their once proud state of self-sufficiency to a critical status, and at the very moment when their futures should have looked the brightest.