OCR Text |
Show You Pay the Bill! Three million American families could have a Utopian way of life on the money the nation pays each year directly into the hands of the liquor trade. The average family pays the four billion dollar liquor bill in things it neeas Dut can t buy because father fa-ther spent several sever-al dollars last month for alcohol. The butcher, the baker and the candle - stick maker pay the 8 liquor bill in lowered incomes. Analyzing "what might havebeen" during 1940, the W.C.T.U. lists some of the things that those three million mil-lion families could have had to enrich en-rich themselves physically, mentally, mental-ly, a d spiritually. House rent, $30 a month; bread, t'.vo loaves daily at 10c; milk, two quarts daily at 10c; meat, 15 pounds a week at 30c a pound; $4 worth of fresh fruit a month; four tickets to the movies; two magazines at $3 each; extra household supplies at $50 for the year. In addition, the family could have paid its subscription to the home- i town paper, father could have had I a new suit, mother and the chil- dren could have spent $80 for clothes and bought three more pairs of $5 shoes. A total of $50 could have been "Turn Off the . past.due doctoer Faucet" bm and &e min ister could have been delighted with $52 more for the church. With all of these extra necessities necessi-ties to well-rounded life, there still would have been something like $065,000,000 left for those three mil-lion mil-lion families to spend. Instead, the W.C.T.U. declares, all that the money actually purchased was hangovers, wrecked bodies, broken bro-ken homes, lost jobs, and the other unsocial effects of "public sale of a narcotic beverage.' |