Poor Rich Farmers

Out of the Agriculture Department came a fistful of figures that should have knocked Congressional farm-bloc arguments into a cocked hat. The statistics proved one point: U.S. farmers collectively are more prosperous than ever before. But to Georgia's Representative Stephen Pace and other farm-bloc members, it is not enough that:

> Net farm income in 1942 is up 45% over 1941.

> Money from marketings is double the 1935-39 average.

> Gross income is about $15.6 billion, a billion more than the World War I peak in 1919.

> Parity calculations make the farmer 36% better off than in 1910-14, which to professional farm leaders were halcyon years.

> Income per farm dweller is almost 275% of 1910-14 figures.

> U.S. farmers this year will have $4.8 billion, free and clear, to spend--eight times more than the 1935-39 average.

But to professional farm leaders outside of Congress as well as in, the figures made no whit of difference. Last week they were in the middle of another attempt to gouge $3.5 billion out of the public for big farmers, who are the chief beneficiaries of the new prosperity. Smacked down in a fight in September against Franklin Roosevelt's inflation-control ultimatum, the farm bloc has since tried new tactics. This time persistent Representative Pace quietly slipped a farm labor cost bill through the House of Representatives. Administration leaders, caught off guard, realized too late that Pace was up to old tricks in trying to break price ceilings and allow farmers to include labor costs in parity figures.

In the nick of time Senate leaders snagged the measure. In turn, the bloc threatened to tack it on to a bill to expand RFC borrowing, thus stalling an urgent piece of wartime legislation. Once again, the farm bloc had the Administration over a barrel, statistics or no statistics.

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