PLANNING 271 



costs would cause consumers to buy less, they felt that the 

 processing tax was unfair to them. 



There are other proposed systems of planning, all of which 

 have several weaknesses. Some people believe in laying out the 

 country in districts according to metropolitan influence. The 

 northwest, for instance, would be a district in which Portland 

 is the dominating metropolitan center. The intermountain re' 

 gion would be laid out around Salt Lake City and so on. The 

 trouble with this is that, although each city might be the most 

 important urban center in the area, it in no way reflects the 

 types of activities which go on there. Planning, which is pri 

 marily concerned with these activities, is an attempt to adjust 

 them so that they will be permanently profitable. 



Another type of proposed planning region is based on an 

 arrangement of groups of states. This is the method followed by 

 the U. S. Farm Security Administration. Unfortunately, the 

 same objection applies here that ruled out the metropolitan 

 influence system. It is difficult to group states in such a way 

 that any group will represent unified activities. 



OVER-ALL REGIONAL PLANNING 



One type of planning that avoids most of the difficulties of 

 the methods we have just discussed is called over-all regional 

 planning. To have regional planning, it would be necessary to 

 divide the country into a series of regions in which a majority of 

 the problems are the same. For instance, there would be a mid- 

 western region. Everybody has an idea of what territory you 

 mean when you say midwest. They probably couldn't draw an 

 exact boundary, but whatever territory they selected would 

 probably include parts of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, 

 Wisconsin, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, 

 Minnesota, Oklahoma. The reason for this is that this region 

 has a regional character, indicating that the problems and the 

 activities of the people are characteristic of that region. The 



