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Show THE AMERICAN WAVj spud lr-"' SPOILAGE ,VV By Gem ' ffip 1 On a recent trip to Canada, I took a terrific "ribbing" from our good northern neighbors, about our asinine antics with that monarch of the vegetable family the potato, colloquially known as "spud." They just can't understand under-stand why a nation laying claim to having a corner on most of the world's executive brains can, in the language of Edgar Bergen, Ber-gen, "be so stupid." It seems that before this year of 1948 has come to an "tend, Canada will have shipped to this country in- excess of 7,000,000 bushels of potatoes, while during the same period our government under its price support plan will have ' purchased in excess of 22,000,000 bushels of potatoes from American potato-growers. What astounds our good friends to the north is that their Canadian-grown potatoes are being be-ing sold in this country at a price less than Uncle Sam is paying the American farmer under un-der the support program. They also find it almost impossible to believe that our government is selling some of our own potatoes for alcohol-making1 purposes at 9c a bushel, or for lc to 18c a bushel for animal feed; while the balance is being dumped into ravines to rot and being sprayed with purple ink to render it in edible. They marvel that while all this nonsense is 'going on, the American housewife is paying S3. 50 a bushel for eating potatoes. po-tatoes. One Canuck rubbed it in with this facetious comment: "It's right neighborly of you folks to dump your surplus potatoes so that you can buy our surplus sur-plus at a fancy price, but I just don't get it." To this jibe, I was unable to make any reply. No wonder our Canadian friends can't understand it. For several months they listened to our bureaucrats and politicians during the recent election campaign, cam-paign, crying to the high heavens about high prices,' laying the blame on monopolies and trusts, while our government, itself, is the real culprit, being committed by its own policies and laws, which it approves and enforces, to keep prices high far higher than they would be if the law of supply and demand was permit-fed permit-fed to operate as in the days before be-fore the starry-eyed government "planning boys" hatched up their brilliant (?) policy of "managed economy." Yes, prices are high, because the government planned them that way. What makes-a bad situation sit-uation even worse is that government govern-ment now talks out of both sides of its mouth. Out of one side, to the consumer, it voices loud lamentations about the horrors of inflation and the constantly rising cost of living; while out of the other side, to the farmer, it hollers for continuance of the present farm price support program. pro-gram. It makes a new high in the art of "double talk." But to get back to our potatoes. po-tatoes. No one wishes the farmer farm-er to take a loss on his potato crop. However, it is ridiculous that tax dollars are being taken from the entire citizenry to subsidize sub-sidize one particular group a group which by no stretch of the imagination can be called "underprivileged," "un-derprivileged," and has not been for many years. We just went through the process pro-cess of electing1 a President and Congress pledged to take action regarding high prices. A good place for them to start would be with the potato by putting a stop to the silly procedure of paying tax money to dump domestic do-mestic potatoes the while we import im-port foreign potatoes. Mrs. Housewife, if you would like to get potatoes back on your table at a price you can afford to pay, I suggest that you clip this article ar-ticle and mail it to your Congressman-elect, adding your own protest against the high cost and wanton waste of SPUD SPOILAGE. |