BRAN NAN
PLAN
We are spending and will continue to spend hundreds of millions.of
dollars every year, trying to keep agriculture going and farmers1 in
come balanced ’at parity1. The more we spend, the more the city folk
growl. They pay taxes to support farm prices, but after paying such
support taxes they do not get farm products at a price that would re
flect what they had invested in' subsidies. Farm products are available
in unprecedented abundance, but the city slicker has to pay prices he
would have tc pay in lean years of scarcity. Something is rotten some
where. It cannot and will not continue, things will break sure as an
Alaskan blizzard;.
But ,that is not all -of the paradox. AMERICA, mind you a Jesuit weekly,
reported already last Nov. 12, as follows: "All across our land gran
aries are bulging, storehouses are bursting. Mountains of wheat (190.6
million bushels, oceans of corn 175 million bushels), pyramids of dry
eggs (64 million pounds) ana of dried milk (204 million pounds) glut
all available storage space and force- the Commodity Credit Corporation
to finance the building of new-warehouses...."
Last October, during the debate on the new farm support act, Senator
Williams, criticizing the act's surplus-scarcity contradiction, rely
ing.on the "put-en-in-storage and let-on-rot'1 policy to bolster select
ed crops, had this to say: "...Vic have accumulated large surpluses of
farm products....During the past 12 months we have stored away in
Government warehouses over 68,000,000 pounds of butter at a cost to
the taxpayer;
freu thw '
pounds of
of over $55,000,000. During the past year vie have removed
rket and stored in Government' warehouses more than a million
w,T’-'-t!, two and a half million pounds of raisins, nearly two
hundred million pounds of peanuts along with 160,000,000 dozen eg*
which have been reduced to dry farm. We have stored over eighty
lion pounds of dried milk representing several million quarts of fluid
milk which have been removed from the regular channels of trade along
with many other commodities, including the much discussed potatoes.
Altogether a total of nearly $3,000,000,000 worth of agricultural com
modities are now being held in storage for lack of sufficient markets.
Much of this will, no doubt, eventually be a total loss."
No reasonable nan can fail to condemn this sacrilegious policy by vir
tue of which needed food is kept from the hungry nan when we recollect
that at this very tine spoken of above a committee of this sane rotten
Congress found that not one third only (the F.D.E. third) tut fully
50 £ of our people have insufficient income for the necessities of life.
A bunch of ."misrepresent at ives so easily find 15 billions of dollars to
waste at least half of it on armies, navies, airfleets ana atonic Bombs?
Sensing something like this the ad:
new, i.e. partly new, but mostly a
the war days.
inistration conceived something brand
conglomerate of what we did dur.r’ng
The essence of this Erannan plan is very simple—let the eggs, the
cheese, the milk ana all other products for which the farmer receives
payment at a high government support price, find their own price level .
on the grocer’s shelves. With a glut overhanging the market, those
prices will be low, and the city worker will get the benefit of the
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