Golden Spuds

The lowly potato was costing the U.S. taxpayer more & more. Last week Agriculture Secretary Charles F. Brannan reported that the Government's wartime potato price-support program, kept alive by the 80th Congress, already had cost $200 million for the 1948 crop and would cost more before the year's output is disposed of. What's more, the Government's mass buying of 1948 potatoes (now at a husky $2.90 to $3.50 per bushel) was keeping prices up in the grocery store, so taxpayers were getting socked twice for every potato they bought.

Assured of high prices, potato farmers produced like crazy and the Government had to buy mountains of spuds. It would have been cheaper to burn them or let them rot, but that always produced nasty cartoons in the papers, so the Administration went to great expense to deliver them for almost nothing to alcohol-making plants and farmers with livestock to feed. Average check from the Treasury to potato growers who sold to the U.S.: $5,457.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.