1212 GENERAL FARM PROGRAAI 



port price and the average price. You would make it dependent upon 

 what that producer actually got for his clip? 



Mr. Jones. That is correct. 



Mr. PoAGE. I can see there are advantages to that, but do not you 

 open the door, when you do that, to interminable fraud? I am not 

 charging the wool growers are any worse than the cotton growers, the 

 corn growers, or the wheat growers; we are all just about alike — the 

 hog growers and everybody else. They are no different from Congress- 

 men or no worse. Would not there be an open temptation there, if I 

 have some wool and I come to you and you are bu3nng it, for you to 

 say "Well, Poage, this wool is worth 40 cents, but I will just give you a 

 receipt for the wool and you give me a receipt for the money, and we will 

 show I only paid you about 25 or 30 cents for it. Then, when you get 

 your Government check, why, you just split with me on the difference, 

 and we will both make a profit out of it, you for the producer's part and 

 I for the buyer's part, and we'll just let Uncle Sam pay it"? And is 

 not that what would happen if you put that open invitation into the 

 law? 



Mr. Jones. I do not think so. The reason I do not think so is be- 

 cause when this wool is sold, no one knows whether or not the payment 

 will be available, and the higher they get the price of the wool sold, 

 the less payment they are going to get, because it will more nearly 

 approach the support level. I do not think it is reasonable to expect 

 that a man, time after time, would falsify his records to that point, 

 not knowing at all what payment he would get, and to try to beat his 

 neighbor out of it, because that is what he would be doing, and even- 

 tually he would eliminate the entire support. 



As 1 visualize this thing, this certificate of sale, the moment the 

 sale is made and dated, goes into the Bureau of Agricultural Eco- 

 nomics, goes to the Department of Agriculture, and, if I see it cor- 

 rectly, that one slip would go to the county committee of the county 

 who would, in turn, forward it and, if that was out of line with the 

 going price, I am quite sure, out in our western country, the county 

 committee could see there was something wrong with it. So I can- 

 not visualize any problem there. 



Mr. PoAGE. I do not see how the countj^ agent could do much 

 hollering about it, because, after all, "these fellows doing the selling 

 are the people who employ him. He owes his job to the local support, 

 and he is not going to holler too loud about a thing of that kind. 



Mr. Jones. The thing that happens in our western country is 

 that when dealers come in to buy wool, everybody pretty well knows 

 what the price established for wool is, and if one fellow gets a quarter 

 of a cent higher than the next fellow, he begins to wonder why; he 

 thinlvs he made a bad sale, and he tries to investigate and see why 

 he could not "spring" the price. 



Mr. Poage. Does not the plan Secretary Brannan suggested to us 

 afford just about all the advantage or reward a grower of a good prod- 

 uct could expect? It still allows the man who grows a superior product 

 to get a superior price, and while he might even sell his wool for more 

 than the support price, if the average price was below the support 

 price, he would still get his payment under the plan Secretary Brannan 

 suggested to us. 



Mr. Jones. He would, but we think on a percentage basis it will 

 encourage the thing our association has striven for and is still striving 



