GENERAL FARM PROGRAM 185 



Secretary Brannan. Mr. Hoeven, may I respectfully say to you 

 that that has been charged a number of times? 



Mr. Taft confronted me with it 1 day on a radio program. I 

 have asked him to produce the evidence that caused him to thinlc we 

 had. 



Mr. HoEVEN. Mr. Secretary, I have before me a talk by Secretary 

 of Agricidtm-e Brannan over CBS on June 9, 1948, in which he says, 

 among other things [reading]: 



President Truman in his special message to Congress on IVIay 14 asked for four 

 kinds of action. First he recommended flexible price supports on a permanent 

 basis. As you know, our present price supports are quite rigid. 



Have 370U and the administration changed your position since that 

 time? 



Secretary Brannan. No; I said to you only a moment ago that I 

 did not want to use the term ''flexible" because it had taken on con- 

 notations which were not meant by its author and which I do not 

 think I would like to become involved with in this discussion. 



Let me be specific. In the farmer's mind over the country, flexible 

 price supports have somehow been identified with low-level price 

 supports. 



Mr. HoEVEN. From 60 to 90 percent? 



Secretary Brannan. Therefore I have thought I should prefer to 

 get away from that connotation and talk about this thing in other 

 language. 



I think we will get more objective consideration and more objective 

 study of it. 



Mr. HoEVEN. Just one more question. 



As I understand it, you are in substance recommending a fixed 

 income for the farmer. 



Secretary Brannan. No, sir. We are recommending a level of 

 national farm income below which it is not in the ])ublic interest to 

 aUow farm income to fall. 



In the next sentence in the statement we say we hope, and I say to 

 you that I would be working to keep farm incomes above that. That 

 level, Mr. Hoeven, is now 15 percent below the average of last year. 



Therefore, I am not recommending to this Congress that we fix 

 farm income at 15 percent below the level of last year. On the con- 

 trary, I am saying 15 percent below that level is as low as we ought to 

 allow it to go and that we ought to strive as hard as we can to keep it at 

 or above that level. 



Mr. HoEVEN. We are trying to arrive at some figure as to the cost 

 of this program. I think it is one of the most important matters that 

 we will have to consider. 



Fixing this so-called farm income, or whatever you want to call it, 

 covers a 10-year period as I understand it. 



We hear all kinds of expressions of opinion that this program will 

 cost from $3,000,000,000 to $10,000,000,000 a year. I am hoping 

 you can furnish us with some figures so that we will know what the 

 actual cost of the program will be. 



The thing that bothers me is that you are using a 10-year basis 

 and assuming that the cost of the program is somewhere between 

 $3,000,000,000 and $10,000,000,000 a year, what is going to happen 

 to that kind of a program if we go into a depression? 



