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"Rising Above Principle." Benson has since done some zigzagging. In 1954, he issued orders that a farmer would have to comply with all acreage allotment rules and marketing quotas to get price supports on any of his crops, e.g., a wheat farmer who cut his acreage to get into the wheat support program could not turn around and plant an unsupported crop on the land and thus contribute to another surplus. Under pressure, Benson later canceled this "cross-compliance" order which, though difficult to administer, would have put sharp teeth in acreage control.
He also zigged on the soil bank. Last fall he was opposed to it and called it a "land rental scheme"; this year, faced with declining prices and even bigger surpluses, he changed his mind, agreed that it should be the heart of the Administration's 1956 farm program. Despite his opposition to high, rigid price supports, he has been willing to promise a firm 82.5% of parity on most basic crops in an effort to prevent Congress from passing a rigid 90% bill. Having learned the politic art of zigzag, he can be philosophical about it. At staff meetings, he has been heard to crack, somewhat ruefully, about "rising above principle."
"Rationing Poverty." The high, rigid price supports that haunt Apostle Benson and the U.S. were adopted originally as a World War II incentive to greater production. After the war they were kept, theoretically to help the farmer make the transition back to peacetime. That they are no real help to the basic problem is easily demonstrable: more than 20% of the drop in the price of farm products occurred between February 1951 and January 1955, while high, rigid supports were in effect. As the worldwide demand for food fell off, the supports only encouraged production for the Government's bins. As of last week, the Commodity Credit Corp. had more than $9 billion of U.S. taxpayers' money (equal to the total U.S. budget of 1940) invested in surplus crops and crop loans, the bulk of it in wheat, corn and cotton.
What has happened in cotton clearly illustrates the ineffectiveness of high, rigid supports even when they are coupled with strict acreage controls. Because the U.S. was supporting (guaranteeing to buy) cotton at 90% of parity, this put a price floor under the world market. Undersold in foreign markets by cheaper cotton grown abroad, undersold at home by cheaper synthetics, U.S. cotton piled up in Government warehouses. To continue getting supports at 90%, cotton farmers last year voted to reduce their acreage by 12% and to market no more cotton than they could grow on the reduced acreage. But then they called on every new device of technology to raise yields per acre 22%, and wound up with a total cotton crop 7% larger than the year before.
The case of burley tobacco has a different ending but the same moral. In 1954, when Congress voted flexible supports for "basic crops," supports for burley were left at 90% of parity. To hold production down, acreage had to be cut and cut. By last year more than 60% of the burley tobacco farms in the U.S. were down to the minimum allowed by the law, one-half of one acre, a plot so small that it can hardly be farmed efficiently. Assistant U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz has a label for the process: "rationing poverty."