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Show J AS.U ALL DUNN by Roy Dunn will get sicker before it recovers. re-covers. The new tax boost is supposed sup-posed to cool a superheated economic boom, but I have my doubts. It's a sad state of affairs af-fairs when it's common knowledge know-ledge that in a country on the second largest continent in the world, there are children starving starv-ing to death by the hundreds, daily. And these same children are being fed ants, bugs, snakes, worms and anything else that might provide them with some protein. Dead rats are offered for sale in the market places, to be eaten by the starving, and all this is encouraged by the health department de-partment of that particular state. And while all this is going on, canned food of chicken, beef and liver flavor is being hawked by the TV commercials commer-cials for cat food. And dog fod. Over here, our dogs live a "dog's life." It was in January of 1914 when Henry Ford announced that from then on, he would pay his employees a minimum of $5 a day for an eight-hour day. This was a sensation. "It was," said the New York Sun, " a bolt out of the blue sky, flashing its way across the continent and far beyond, something unheard of in the history of business.' HOWDY, FOLKS- One week ago today was the regular regu-lar payday where I work, and the first glance at the yellow pieces of paper caused me to faint. The doctor treated me for shock and sent me home for the day. He said that business bus-iness had been pretty good that day for the nervous system can stand only so much. I am recovered now and feel fine, thank you. Over the last twenty years, working men, both white and blue collar, have gotten pretty tough. But one is never really prepared for the latest tax raise, although you have known it was coming for weeks or months. Of course, we all know .that the government is spending money like an alcoholic in a liquor store with a credit card. But we hope this new 10 percent per-cent income tax surcharge isn't permanent. But don't you remember the emergency sales tax was enacted en-acted during the early 1930's by Governor Blood's adminstra-tion? adminstra-tion? This was to have been in effect for the duration of the emergency only, but it's still in effect after more than 35 years. Maybe we still have the emergency with us. But we were told that when the depression was over, they would lift it. Maybe the depression de-pression is still on. I don't know. But I do know that we have a very sick economy, and Conference Board (NICB) calculated: cal-culated: That in 1939 a man making $5000 a year (about $2.40 an hour) who had a wife and two kids had $4941 of his pay to spend, after taxes. Now in 1968, the NICB said, he needs a salary of $14,282 a year to maintain the same $4941 level of spending. Because taxes now eat up $2083 of his income and inflation since 1939 has taken away $7258. So there you have it, folks. Strikes for higher pay, workers work-ers get more pay. Taxes go up immediately. So does the price of beans. More wage raises, higher taxes, groceries are repriced, re-priced, and so-on. Where in the heck is it all going to end? About 1939, I was driving nails for a contractor who was building the powder plant at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon. I didn't make $2.40 an hour. The carpenter scale was $1.10 an hour then and we were darned glad to get it. But to go back farther, in 1934, I sawed beeves down the back in a packing house for 20 cents an hour. I was darned glad to get that, too. I'm sure that a lot of you folks have similar stories to tell, all true. So I guess we will all just have to go along, putting one foot in front of the other and do what we are told.- Shucks, folks, I had intended to tell you this time how my old hound dog got hisself killed down there on the Peckerwood Lake in ' Arkansaw. But I got so stirred up over this surtax that I forgot. I'll tell you all about Old lead, and how that hound dog got killed one of these days. Three dollars an hour . . . NICE, But . . . SEE YA'ALL LATER. Ford was praised by some for a "magnificent act of generosity" gen-erosity" and by others condemned condem-ned as a socialist or something. But a socialist paper in New York denounced him because it said that he had "Purchased "Purchas-ed the brains, life and soul of his men by a raise in pay of a few dollars a week." In June of 1968 the factory worker in the United States on the average scared another new high in wages. The Labor Department announced that for the first time the average hourly pay in the U.S. manufacturing manu-facturing reached $3 or $24 for an eight hour day. Nobody praised or condemned con-demned anybody. In this same month, electricians electric-ians on construction work in Detroit, where Ford made his historic announcement in 1914, negotiated a new wage contract con-tract which next year will bring their hourly pay to $8.56, including in-cluding fringe benefits. At the last reading, Labor Department mediators were working to settle 353 strikes, wage raises being involved in most of the disputes. More are to come this year some of them big ones. Just recently the National |