Word: milke
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Human beings are rarely more nauseating than when they play the do-gooder and know it. The tight lipped evil of a monocled Erie Stroherm snapping his swagger stick has nothing on the gagging scale to the beatific smiles found on any evangelical show, their lips drooling the milk of human kindness. The only reason that the prototypical single of the Band band-wagon ("Do They Know It's Christmas") could be stomached was that it got no higher on the saccharinemeter than the usual sappy Christmas season pieties that inundate America's speakers after Thanksgiving. Radio stations had enough...
Under the 1949 act, the Federal Government agreed to buy up dairy products that could not be sold on the open market. The price was tied to parity, a complicated index of earnings and farm costs designed to ensure that the price of milk gave farmers roughly the same purchasing power it did back in the golden days of farming before World War I. Parity was an appealing idea, but it did not allow for the radical changes in farming that have made cows increasingly productive...
Still, the milk price-support system was not unduly expensive until the early 1970s. Then drought and detente intervened: the sale of wheat to the Soviets in 1972 and the parched summer of 1974 drove up feed costs, resulting in lower dairy production and higher milk prices. To put more cows on-line, Congress in 1973 raised the minimum price support from 75% of parity...
Farmers naturally jacked up production to take advantage of the higher prices paid for milk and cheese surpluses. In 1973 the Government purchased only 1.9% of milk products, but by 1980 its share of the market had grown to 7%. In 1981, in a feeble stab at slowing production, Congress dropped parity as an index and froze the price at $13.10 per hundredweight. Still production rose. In 1983 the Government bought 12% of all dairy products and stored away an incredible 17 billion lbs. of butter, cheese and dried milk. The cost to taxpayers had risen from $136 million...
...does Congress treat the dairy support system like a sacred cow? The main reason is the strong dairy lobby: the Associated Milk Producers PAC was the tenth-largest campaign contributor to Congressmen in 1984. Yet, despite this clout, most dairy farmers realize that some reforms are inevitable. "We want to be less dependent on subsidies," says James Jarvis, a small dairy farmer in Wautoma, Wis. "But we can't be cut off cold turkey. We've got to be let down slow...