Farm Pharmacy

Only a magician could have performed the feat that Harry Truman blithely promised the voters in his election campaign last fall. The President told farmers he would keep up their sky-high farm prices and he pledged consumers a painless cost of living. The man Harry Truman picked to do the trick was no magician, and not even a farmer. He was a bald, inconspicuous Colorado lawyer, Secretary of Agriculture Charles F. Brannan. Last week Brannan went before the House and Senate Agriculture Committees and solemnly pulled a rabbit out of his hat. Even as rabbits go, it was a queer-looking animal.

Secretary Brannan proposed to let the price of food fall where it would on a free market, while guaranteeing farmers a whopping big cash income, no matter how cheaply their crops sold in the marketplace. To hear him tell it he had "a method which not only protects the farmer but gives consumers a real break."

Wondrous Pill. Implicit in the Administration plan was an admission that the Government's present parity program was getting out of hand. It used to be a way of guaranteeing the farmer the purchasing power he had during the good years 1910-14; it was a lot more generous than that now, and infinitely more complicated. The Administration proposed to continue buying storable crops like wheat, corn and tobacco, to keep their prices up. But for perishables, such as meat, poultry, milk, vegetables--75% of the yearly farm output--the Government had something new to offer. It would let market prices for these commodities rise & fall with the tides of supply & demand. The U.S. Treasury would dole out to farmers the difference between the guaranteed prices and the market prices.

For instance, Brannan went on, the farm price for eggs would be set at 45.8-c- a dozen next year. If eggs dropped to 35-c- the Government would just pay the farmer 10.8-c- for every dozen he sold at that price. Result: the farmer would still have his 45.8-c- ; the consumer would have cheap eggs. That way, said Brannan triumphantly, the consumer wouldn't have to pay twice for the subsidies; once in taxes and again in high food bills.

One thing these days was as sure as death & taxes: the Government is going to pay the farmer to keep him prosperous. Long ago a Republican Congress tried to buy the farmer's vote with the McNary-Haugen bill, but Calvin Coolidge twice vetoed it; Henry Wallace bought the farmer and got away with it. Secretary Brannan's program was an even higher bid for the U.S. farmer's favor than any Henry had thought up. Said the New York Times's Arthur Krock: ". . . no more wondrous pill was ever compounded in the pharmacy of politics." The National Farmers Union, itself an expert concocter of pills, thought the Brannan plan was really wonderful, hailed it as a "milestone." The powerful American Farm Bureau Federation thought it sounded pretty revolutionary.

Control with a Vengeance. Actually, even among the farm groups, hardheaded farmers looked skeptically on Charlie Brannan's rabbit. From the farmer's standpoint, the suspicious part of the deal was that it would also give the Government more power to decide what farmers could plant, how they could sell. A limit would be placed on how many benefits a farmer would receive from the Treasury, but this, said Brannan, would really encourage smaller farms; it would hit only the big farms making up 2% of the nation's 5,800,000 farms. Thundered Vermont's Senator George Aiken, an old hand at farm legislation: "It would be a controlled economy with a vengeance . . ."

Not so, protested Brannan. The magic rabbit would make things nicer for farmer and consumer, and that meant everybody. But how much would it cost and who would pay for it? Charlie Brannan wasn't able to say offhand what the cost would be; he thought it would be no more than the cost of the present price-support program (an estimated $860 million this fiscal year, an unpredictable part of which may be recouped in later years by the Government in sales of stored surpluses). But for those who liked their arithmetic plain, the answer seemed too familiar. It looked as if the rabbit might save the consumer some money on his bills, but it also seemed inevitable that he would have to pay it back to the Government on income-tax day--and a great deal more besides, if bureaucracy ran true to form.

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