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Updated: May 22, 2025
The Rural Development Program to better the lot of low-income farm families deserves full Congressional support. The Great Plains Program must go forward vigorously. Advances on these and other fronts will pull down the pricedepressing surpluses and raise farm income.
Some products, priced out of domestic markets, and others, priced out of world markets, have piled up in government hands. In a world in which millions of people are hungry, destruction of food would, of course, be unconscionable. Yet surplus stocks continue to threaten the market and in spite of the acreage controls authorized by present law, surpluses will continue to accumulate.
True, the record, unbroken since 1873, of annual failure to meet even operating expenses, was varied after 1898 by small surpluses in two years out of three, but the net deficits since Confederation rose to over eleven millions by 1913; and while there was no question that the administration had been improved, there was room for belief that the surpluses had been in part book-keeping ones, obtained by including in the large capital expenditure items properly chargeable to revenue.
Farm production stayed up while demand and prices fell, in contrast with industry where prices stayed up and output declined, farm surpluses piled up, and disaster followed. We must make sure of meeting the problems which we failed to meet after the first World War.
As a beginning there should be created a Federal farm board consisting of able and experienced men empowered to advise producers' associations in establishing central agencies or stabilization corporations to handle surpluses, to seek wore economical means of merchandising, and to aid the producer in securing returns according to the a14 of his product.
It depends also upon the opportunity to ship abroad large surpluses of particular commodities, and therefore upon sound economic relationships between the United States and many foreign countries. It involves research and scientific investigation, conducted on an extensive scale. It involves special credit mechanisms and marketing, rural electrification, soil conservation, and other programs.
The question therefore now comes forward, To what other objects shall these surpluses be appropriated, and the whole surplus of impost, after the entire discharge of the public debt, and during those intervals when the purposes of war shall not call for them? Shall we suppress the impost and give that advantage to foreign over domestic manufactures?
The colonials possessed a great deal more jewelry than might be imagined. The opulence of the English merchants, trading in all parts of the world, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had enabled many to invest their surpluses in jewels, which fluctuated less than the unsteady values in the media of exchange, and, therefore, were an investment rarely decreasing in value.
It dammed up vast unsalable surpluses, helping to bring about unemployment and suffering in the United States and everywhere else. To point the way to break up that log-jam our Trade Agreements Act was passed based upon a policy of equality of treatment among nations and of mutually profitable arrangements of trade.
When the original farm laws were written, an hour's farm labor produced only one fourth as much wheat as at present. Farm legislation is woefully out-of-date, ineffective, and expensive. For years we have gone on with an outmoded system which not only has failed to protect farm income, but also has produced soaring, threatening surpluses.
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