The Redwood gazette. [volume] (Redwood Falls, Minn.) 1873-1940, 1933-02-02
Allotment

tanning industry have cause to wonder whether tne
should favor oppose the plan.
The following paragraphs are from an article
the February issue of the Country Home magazln
which answered the arguments advanced to defeat tn
measure and caused many of us to become vigorou
advocators of the immediate adoption OF the plan.
Note first the name Voluntary Domestic,
Allotment. Voluntary means that no farmer has
to come in on the thing unless he wants to. Do
mestic means that, for those who do come in, the
Bureau of Internal Revenue will collect, at the
point where the product enters into processing
the flour cotton rice mill, the packing house,
and so on-an excise sales tax, which amounts
to sort of internal tariff. Allotment means that
this money will be paid directly to the farmers who
agree not to increase their present acreage or
animal units, and to cut down some, if need be.
The general protest first arising this: To
tax the consumer for the benefit of the producer
was crime. Since, however, this country has for
many years, through tariffs, taxed consumers for
the benefit of manufacturers, that argument,
plainly, could not be pushed very far. 1t soon
sank to confused murmur.
The attack now took another direction far more
telling Confused and needlessly elaborate des-
criptions of the plan were published, and on the
basis of these descriptions the authors thereof
cluded, signing that it was lovely plan, this
Domestic Allotment idea, beautiful on paper, a
regular professors dream The only trouble was,
it wouldn't work. 1t too complicated. It
would take an army to enforce it, new and fab
ulously expensive corps of bureaucrats, striding
this country, telling people what they must
and mustn't grow.
No better way could be imagined to kill off
this new measure than to saddle it, in the public
imagination, with a mythical army of crop
policemen, as above. The fact u.s. the necessary
70 DO
and to put the plan into operation now exists, paid
for: the Department of Agriculture and it's extern
sion workers. If the farmers of this country real
ly want under the conditions named, this $780,
100000 more which, it seems, the government
VIII hold out to them during the next crop year,
the thing can be done without drawing upon
single nickel of present government revenue, and
with few if any additions to the public pay roll.
The principles on which this act is based are
absolutely right and sound They have been APP
piled in other great countries with success. Italy,
France and Germany have, by tariffs, stabilized
the price of wheat at around $3.50 bushel. That
is what Their farmers have been getting for wheat
even when American farmers were getting 40
cents.
Our aim is 90-cent or dollar wheat Our ex-
else tax, collected at the MILL would begin with,
say, AZ cents bushel for wheat. But this tax will
be variable from year to year. If the price of
wheat at the farm increased to, say, so CENTS then
the tax would not exceed 20 cents; and if the
world price was dollar or more there would be
tax.
In a word, the object of this tax is to induce
farmer so to reduce his production that the tax
will be unnecessary. The plan is self retiring
The consumer is protected against rise of staple
food prices above the pre-war level.
Other farm relief proposals, promising to
raise the price, would have brought lands into
cultivation. Here we discourage this. If you start
raising wheat on hundred acres, say, which have
not been sowed to wheat before, you rate only
20-acre allotment at the end of the first year, and
come to the full 100-acre allotment only at the
end of the sixth. You can't jump in all at once
for the sake of the allotment.
The tax we intend to start should make 90
cent wheat bring the farmer 80 cents or dollar
bushel this year. Even were all this tax passed
along from the millers to the consumers, it would
add only about seven-eighths of cent loaf to
the price of bread. Call it cent loaf. None
of us, think, would begrudge it, in view of the
boost that dollar wheat and roughly correspond
ing rise in the price of cotton hogs, tobacco and
rice, would give to business.
The trouble in this country is that we have
devoted altogether too much attention to expanding
our producing capacity and have not kept pace in
expanding our consuming capacity by keeping up
buying power. Thirty million farmers have pro-
duced teeming crops, and the they produced
the less they received. Is it any wonder that
workers in our cities, making things farmers used
to buy, unemployed?
Let us assume that congress has passed the
act. You've been growing fifty acres of wheat and
averaging twenty bushels to the acre for the past
five years. Fifty acres at twenty bushels to the
acre is thousand bushels. You are eligible for
an adjustment certificate three quarters of
your average crop, seven hundred and fifty
bushels. The reason for the three quarters chats
the figure generally used in discussing this plan
and it's close enough for practical purposes) is