Ike v. the Wheat Scandal

Inspired by the success of President Eisenhower's recent television appeal for a strong law to fight labor racketeering, Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson last week marched into Gettysburg, returned with a promise that Ike would plow into the multi-billion-dollar farm-subsidy scandal. Before Congress reconvenes next January, Benson said, the President will go on television with a direct appeal for public support of Benson's proposals to end the wheat surplus for which taxpayers pay dearly.

There is plenty of reason for a presidential plea to do something about wheat. The present wheat-support program (75% of parity, with a 55 million-acre limit on planting) is building toward a record 1.5 billion bushel surplus next year (cost: $3.5 billion). Benson's solution, which Congress ignored this year in passing its own bill, which President Eisenhower vetoed, would do away with acreage controls and include price supports that slide a little each year toward true market levels.

But what Ike accomplished in throwing his weight into the labor-bill battle may be a lot tougher to achieve in the farm fight. For one thing, the labor bill that Ike backed seemed to offer effective remedies for the problem of labor racketeering. There is reason to doubt that Ezra Benson is offering an effective solution to the surplus-wheat problem, which follows the general line of the corn program he got written into law last year. Under that program, farmers were assured a slightly lower but still profitable Government price for all the corn they could raise. They turned up land that had not been used in years (TIME, May 25), poured on fertilizer, by last week were growing a record surplus that figures to sock the U.S. taxpayer $500 million or more for this year's crop.

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