GENERAL FARM PROGRAM 235 



three times as many people in the United States as there are in 

 England, it would cost us $6,000,000,000 under my proposal. 



I respectfully say to you that Mr. Taft might as well have compared 

 the cost of my proposal to the cost of the Berlin airlift or of a military 

 campaign in China. There is, in my opinion, no relationship what- 

 soever between them. 



Britain buys most of its food from the outside world. That is the 

 reason it has to subsidize it to its own consumers. It is not getting 

 most of its food from its own people, and at the same time that it is 

 subsidizing wheat to its consumers, wheat that it buys from America, 

 it is also paying its own farmers another 15 cents a bushel to try to 

 increase the domestic production of it. 



In that case it is paying money in both directions, and I do not see 

 any similarity whatsoever, and I think the analogy by Mr. Taft was 

 wholly unwarranted and unrelated. I am sure that you do not intend 

 the analogy as he did. 



Mr. Hope. I did not intend to compare the two systems. I was 

 just comparing human nature. I just wondered if we were so different 

 from the British that our people would not resent an increase in the 

 price of food if they thought that through a Government program 

 they could keep the price down. 



I do not have to go as far away as Britain because we can take the 

 question of rent control in this country as an example. I am not 

 going to go into that question, except to say that we have the same 

 arguments every year for rent control, and I think we will have the 

 same ones 10 years from now because people who are tenants do not 

 like to have their rent increased no matter what the change in condi- 

 tions may be. 



We are here now almost 4 years after the end of the war with rent 

 control still in effect, and maybe it ought to be, but I know every 

 year when any attempt is made to take rent controls off we are going 

 to have resistance on the part of tenants because they have adjusted 

 their living and their pattern of spending and everything else to rents 

 at the present levels, notwithstanding the fact that all other prices 

 have gone up. So naturally they are going to be opposed to any 

 change in their status that requires the payment of any larger propor- 

 tion of their income in the way of rent. 



I think without going into the rightness or wrongness of continued 

 rent controls at all that you have exactly the same thing in this 

 question of food prices. 



Secretary Brannan. "Well, the American people have taken their 

 increases in food prices even during the war in pretty good grace. 

 They complained about some of the regulations that came along 

 with the prices. 



Mr. Hope. "Well, it is a fact, that food prices have gone up just 

 about as much percentagewise as the increase in national income and 

 the increase in weekly wages during the same period, and the increase 

 in weekly wages has considerably exceeded the total over-all increase 

 in the cost of living. Under those circumstances they should not 

 object. 



The Chairman. Will the gentleman yield there? 



Mr. Hope. Yes. 



