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Show THE CITIZEN 4 home brew. 1WI10 is to blame for it? Did such conditions exist before prohibition? Prohibitionists told us that the next generation will not know the taste of liquor. What is one to think of so many conflictory statements and the present conditions which exist today? Prominent families have become involved in this alleged; liquor scandal. Government officials who have been paid to enforce the prohibition laws have been found wanting. The average person met on the street seems to think the law is a joke. Where is it all to lead to? SUGAR FACTS. Sugar comStephen II. Love, sales manager of the Utah-Idah- o pany, in a letter to the Citizen, takes exception to an editorial under the caption of sugar, published in The Citizen under date of May 26. He says : I am in receipt of a clipping from the Intermountain Press Clipping Bureau of an editorial appearing in your issue of May 26th in which you comment on an article published in Facts About Sugar, and in which you make the following statement: . . . Sugar made at our back door can be shipped to New York city, paying freight over two thousand miles, and then be purchased for about a dollar less than we can buy it at home. It matters not whether you purchase the sugar at one of our grocery stores or at the factory. Who gets the added freight charges upon unshipped sugar? If we have to pay freight charges, what incentive is there to produce at home? Now, while the general tenor of this article is evidently intended to be helpful to the local industry, the statement quoted above has the very opposite effect. In the first place, it is not true that sugar made here can be shipped to New York city and back and be purchased for less money than here as the daily sugar quotations prove. The variations in the retail price of sugar over the country are exceedingly small, depending very largely upon purchases made by the wholesaler from time to time and his faith in the market. The price . of sugar is' based upon prevailing price at seaboard refining points, such as New York, New Orleans and San Francisco, for the reason that seventy-fiv- e per cent of the sugar consumed in the United States is refined and offered for sale at these points. The producers of sugar in the interior, in states such as Utah and Idaho, whose production represents about 1J4 per cent of the total con-- , sumption, cut about as much figure in establishing the price as the Utah producer of wheat does in the wheat market. Personally, I have spent my life in the mercantile business and in my time have handled hundreds of different commodities, and I desire to say that sugar is not sold any differently than any other commodity, regardless of what any one may say to the contrary. In fact, if the sugar industry of Utah and Idaho was wiped out of existence tomorrow' the people of Utah would be obliged to pay the same prices for their sugar as they are paying now. If anything, they would have to pay more because the people of the Intermountain country get their sugar supply every day in the year for twenty cents per hundredweight less than if they depended upon the cane from Hawaii or the Philippines, and the person who imagines that the price here is based upon the freight rate to Chicago or New. York is misinformed, as any merchant in Utah would gladly explain. Competition fixes the price of all unmonopolized commodities, and sugar is no exception. Yours very truly, signed S. II. Love, sales manager. Since that editorial was written, the United States Sugar Association has sent out a brief signed by M. Doran, the assistant secreConsumers living in Brigham City, tary, which says: Utah; Sugar City, Idaho; Greeley, Colorado; Billings, Montana; Lovell, Wyoming, or Scottsbluff, Nebraska, whose back yards might happen to adjoin a beet sugar plant, are forced to pay the same price for beet sugar produced in their respective cities as the cost .... of cane sugar delivered from New Orleans, more than a thousand miles away. By, avariciously, following the delivered price of New Orleans cane, instead of one adjusted to their actual costs of production, domestic beet factories, secretly and successfully contrive to capitalize all of the increased costs imposed upon refiners of Cuban sugars and the freight handicaps under which they compete, to their unconscionable profit, at the expense of local consumers. Profits, entirely independent of costs of production, through this form of extortion, upon the basis of quotations ranging from 6.75c to 7.59c per pound. This extra tribute is being wrenched from their local consumers notwithstanding a surplus much in excess of local consumption which should insure lower, instead of higher prices The highest sugar prices in the United States prevail in Idaho, Montana, Utah and Colorado, where fifty beet sugar factories produced 500,000,000 pounds in excess of local consumption. Prices quoted in some of the principal cities, April 26, 1923, were as follows : Hawaiian Cane Domestic Beet $1.00 less per sack than in Salt Lake City. Beet sugar is sold from 10 to 20 points less than cane sugar at competitive points, primarily because consumers always prefer cane over beet sugar. In California there was a surplus production of 938,366,000 pounds of sugar. It is thus revealed that the prices of than in the tariff-taxe- d section sugar are higher in the of the country. And the United States Sugar Associaion concludes with that the government should investigate the manner of fixing prices practiced west of the Mississippi, in its search for a combination and conspiracy in restraint of trade, against consumers of tariff-exem- pt sugar. President Harding telegraphed the Tariff Commission from St. Augustine, Florida, on March 27th, as follows: Have the Tariff Commission make immediate inquiry into the relation of the sugar tariff to the current prices of that commodity. It is difficult to believe that the duty on sugar can have any part in making the abnormal 'prices that prevail but if the commission finds that there is any ground for believing the duty to be even partially responsible I shall be ready to proclaim a reduction in duty as provided by law. The sugar which is now being offered for sale .was bargained for with the farmers and the cost of production was fixed in March, 1922. The price of sugar has advanced over 5 cents per pound since March, 1922, with relatively inconsequential increased costs to the domestic industry. According to reports issued, California farmers were paid more for their beets than the Utah farmers received for their beets. However, California sugar sold for nearly a dollar less per sack than in Utah. How can that be? If California sent her sugar to Utah, most of us can readily see where we would be compelled to pay the California price plus the freight charges here. There has been a big surplus production of sugar west of the Rocky Mountains. We are told the prices are regulated according of sugar to production. Then how in the face of an is it possible for prices to soar as they have done in sugar at the present time? What is to become of this of sugar? If the Intermountain factories compete in the open market they must sell their product cheaper to foreigners than to the local merchants, or else they cannot sell. No one is going to pay more for sugar because it is made in Utah. The man who buys in the market does the best price. over-producti- over-producti- on on |