Target: Farm Subsidies

Like the militia at Lexington, the straggling but powerful forces of the nation's industrial states rallied in the House last week to shoot down a proposal for a still bigger farm-subsidy handout. There were some who thought that the shot would ring through the next session of Congress, might well signal the beginning of the end for the whole ramshackle $7 billion-a-year farm-subsidy program. The battle began because Midwestern farm Democrats had boldly determined to play election-year politics with wheat. In a straight party-line vote, they engineered the defeat (108-92) of a Senate-passed bill approved by the Administration, calling for a 20% cut in wheat acreage and a continued price support of 75% of parity. In its place they wheeled out a bill raising supports to 85% of parity and slicing acreage by 25%--a formula President Eisenhower would surely veto. They planned to use that veto to scourge Republicans throughout the Midwest. The farm Democrats got a veto, all right, but to their shock, it came in a crushing 236-170 defeat of the bill by the Democratic-controlled House. Surprise defectors were big-city Democrats, who have for years gone along with the farm bloc on high-price supports as a matter of party loyalty. But this year urbanized Congressmen have been feeling the sting of voters who blame the wheat farm-subsidy scandal for the rising cost of living. New England Democrats went solidly against the wheat bill, with the exception of Massachusetts' John McCormack, floor leader, and Connecticut's Chester Bowles, Democratic-convention-platform committee chairman. Only four of Pennsylvania's 16 Democrats were for the bill. All of New Jersey's five Democrats were opposed; only two out of New York's 18 Democrats followed the farmers. Even a few Southerners joined non-farm forces; only nine farm boys defected from Minority Leader Charlie Halleck's disciplined Republican ranks. The farm Democrats had badly fumbled a major domestic issue. Since there was now virtually no prospect of a farm bill this session, they might pay for their mistake at the polls in the wavering Midwest. They had also ignored a warning sounded fortnight before by a respected fellow Democrat, Rhode Island's John Fogarty, that farm-subsidy programs are "foolish programs that have not helped even those farmers for whom the legislation was intended in the first place." After the vote there was talk in the cloakrooms for the first time in 30 years that the time was close at hand when the U.S. would have to get the farm program off its back. Also in Congress last week: P: The Senate, by a surprising 84-0 roll-call vote, passed up an election-year tax cut, rejected the proposal of the powerful Senate Finance Committee (made over Chairman Harry Byrd's objections) for repeal of 10% excise tax on travels, telegrams and local telephone service. Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson called vacationing Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson before the debate, heard from his fellow Texan what repeal would mean to the Treasury: loss of $750 million in tax revenue, a slimmer surplus in fiscal 1961. As the $4 billion tax bill rolled to passage, Johnson and Budget Guardian Byrd got unexpected support from Pennsylvania's free-spending Joe Clark, who candidly noted the Democratic Party "cannot go into the coming campaign as a party of fiscal irresponsibility." P: The House unenthusiastically approved a bill providing medical care for the aged because it could not be amended on the floor and faced quick death if returned to committee. Covering roughly 1,000,000 persons over 65, the program would cost a hazily estimated $325 million in its first year (1961) to be split by state and federal governments. States would join voluntarily, scale the program to suit their needs. Rhode Island's Aime J. Forand, sponsor of a far more ambitious Democratic medical-aid plan, blasted the bill ("a watered-down version of a no-good bill that came from the White House") but added his vote to the 380-to-23 majority that sent the measure along with hopes of heavy amendment in the Senate.

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