In the Front Or Back Seat?

HELLO FOLKS—Even if today's cars are supposed to be mechanically perfect and smooth running, some of them have a lot of jerks in them.



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AN OPEN mind is often an invitation to somebody to drop a worthwhile thought into it.

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THERE SEEMS to be a deliberate attempt to brand the farmer as one who is 'waxing fat' off of government subsidies.

The consumer, who often is poorly informed as to the facts, is led to believe that he is footing the bill of the 'subsidy machine' and that the farmer just has to go to the 'teat' and get what he wants.

This is a complete distortion of the facts. True the farmer has been and still is the recipient of an occasional government payment; but the greatest part of the Department of Agriculture budget is as direct an aid to the consumer as it is to the farmer.

The total amount of subsidies paid out to farmers through the CCU since 1933 is less than the amount paid to the postoffice in ten years.

Included in the farm budget is the school milk program. Who gets the benefits? All of us, of course. True, part of the reason for the school lunch program was to get rid of some of the stored Products. But today there is no surplus of these things and still we go on with the program. Therefore it is not fair to call it a farm subsidy.

Public Law 480 is part of the agriculture budget. Yet it's main aim today is to give underdeveloped nations assistance. Therefore it cannot be rightly considered a farm subsidy.

It is to the benefit of ALL Americans to have a good supply of storable commodities on hand. True, it is overdone and the farmers are trying as hard as any-one to correct the situation.

It is also to the benefit of national security that we have a reasonable soil bank. The public should be aware of this and ready to back a good program. I personally think that it is not to the benefit of the farmer to have such a program any more than to the citizenry as a whole. We store billions of dollars worth of strategic materials to be used in case of emergency, so why not use our land and food for the same purpose?

I think we will all agree that the use of subsidies is definitely overdone, and we should try to get away from them as much as possible but do you realize that if there were no subsidies in the marine industry we would have no merchant Marine today? It is a fact that the great ship, United States, was subsidized to the tune of half its cost.

Tariffs are a form of subsidies. We have a high tariff on a lot of products in order to protect our own markets.

It is a fact that a lot of subsidies poured into agriculture have driven the farmer's income down and given the consumer cheaper food at the expense of the farmer whom the subsidy was intended to help.

Were it not for the postal subsidies such as magazines as Life, instead of costing 25 cents, would cost more near 50 cents. The same goes for most of the other weekly and monthly magazines.

Subsidies are not all bad and if we had not used them in many instances our nation would not today be as far along economically as it is. However, they have beer far overdone to the harm of al in a good many cases.