Ticket Dole?

Although the New Deal has striven through AAA I and II to cut crop production for six years, the nation has been steadily faced by a great economic, political, humanitarian dilemma: agricultural plenty existing side by side with human want. To resolve it without dislocating business has proved a ticklish job.

Federal Surplus Commodities Corp. is now spending some $50,000,000 a year buying surpluses and giving them to the poor, which pleases the poor and the farmers but worries the food distributing industry. Last fall Secretary of Agriculture Wallace proposed a bolder "two-price plan" under which surplus goods would be sold at one price to most buyers, at a lower price to the needy. Business reacted so unfavorably that the plan was hastily abandoned. Last week came news of something new under the agricultural sun: a new plan to make farmers, Business and the poor equally happy.

When FSCC's President Jesse Tapp was shelved along with the two-price plan late in January, he was succeeded by a well-groomed young (39) businessman named Milo Randolph Perkins. In 1934 when outspoken Milo Perkins was running his own cotton-bagging business in Houston, he wrote Henry Wallace a hot letter denouncing administrative red tape in the first AAA, wrote an article in the Nation excoriating the shortsightedness of his fellow capitalists. In 1935 Henry Wallace hired Mr. Perkins as Assistant Secretary. He later became Assistant Farm Security Administrator, learned plenty at first hand about the woes of stricken agriculturists. Last week Washington Correspondent Alfred Stedman of the St. Paul Dispatch, who had just resigned from a $9,000-a-year publicity job with the Department, uncorked first details of the Perkins Plan, scheduled for formal announcement and discussion at a food trade conference in Washington on March 13-14.

In keeping with the Administration's new business appeasement drive, Mr. Wallace's Mr. Perkins proposes to hand over to Business itself the distribution of surpluses. Instead of buying surpluses direct from farmers and doling them out to the needy, FSCC will dole out tickets redeemable for food at any grocery. Grocers would do all the buying and selling, cash the tickets at post offices or other local Government agencies. Families would eventually get enough tickets to increase their food consumption 50%; i.e., a poor family spending $16 a month for food would get $8 in tickets. There would be no price controls; retailers and wholesalers will get their usual profits, thereby making the plan politically appealing. Details of the scheme were not worked out last week, but it was reported that the Perkins Plan would be tried out first in five or six selected cities.

FSCC has an allotment of 30% of U. S. customs receipts (about $90,000,000 a year) with which to launch the plan, if and when adopted.

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