Word: butz
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...farmers to keep land out of production under the so-called set-aside program last year. Federal payments to farmers soared to $4.1 billion from $3.1 billion the year before, and food production dropped by more than 2%. Nixon's chosen executor of this policy, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, performed zealously. "You won't get me to apologize for high meat prices," Butz told North Dakota wheat growers last year. "I'm spending money like a drunken sailor...
With a domestic grain shortage staring them in the face, and consumers complaining about rising food prices, Nixon and Butz quickly reversed farm policy. Prodded by Treasury Secretary George Shultz, an ardent free marketeer, they proposed a new laissez-faire farm policy that would abandon some price supports and reduce other subsidies. They returned as much acreage as possible to production, dropped export subsidies and prepared to "empty" the Government storage bins. Though they forecast that such moves would cause food prices to level off after midyear, that was not soon enough for irate consumers...
...White House is quite cold-bloodedly clear about its plans for the farm of the future. It emphatically does not subscribe to the notion that inefficient farmers must be kept on the land for the sake of tradition. Not for Nixon or Butz or Shultz the sentiment of the English poet Oliver Goldsmith: "But a bold peasantry, their country's pride/ When once destroyed can never be supplied." "Farming isn't a way of life," says Butz. "It's a way to make a living." He regards as inevitable the growing consolidation of farms, while marginal ones...
...Guarantee income rather than prices. Secretary Butz has repeatedly argued that the justification for high food prices is the farmer's understandable desire to earn an adequate income. Government subsidies and price supports, however, line the pockets of big, rich farmers far more than lower-income people on the land. Thus Washington should stop interfering with the free movement of agricultural prices and attack the periodic problem of low farm income directly -by supplementing what the marginally efficient farmer gets at market with outright Government payments. Under this plan, the Government would determine just how high the market prices...
...promoted three Cabinet members to the rank of Presidential Counsellor, with broadened responsibility for handling interdepartmental programs. Health, Education and Welfare Secretary-designate Caspar Weinberger will become Counsellor for Human Resources, Housing and Urban Development Secretary-designate James Lynn will be Counsellor for Community Development, and Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz will oversee Natural Resources. Each will confront related problems that overlap various departments. The shift is sensible, but it has been accomplished at the expense of the other Cabinet officers, who have clearly suffered a demotion. From now on, for example, if Interior Secretary Rogers Morton wants...