Word: silver
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...worst examples of unnecessary U. S. subsidies is the silver purchase program. Under it a little group of Western silver producers has milked the U. S. Treasury of more than $197,949,383 in the last five years. Four and a half times that sum, $912,822,539, has been handed out to British, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican and other foreign peddlers...
...Labor Department's list of 784 commodities, silver's importance is rated at .07 of 1%. The chewing gum industry's output is twice as valuable as silver mining. Silver though supported, productionwise is only as important as grape jelly, or wire nails, or packers' prime tallow, or anhydrous ammonia. Silver is less important than linoleum, glue, leather gloves, strawberries, spaghetti, nuts...
Under the 1934 Silver Purchase Act, the U. S. has bought more than 2,200,000,000 oz. of silver-most of it to be buried immediately in West Point, N. Y. vaults. Intent of the Act was to force the Treasury to buy silver until the market price should reach $1.29 per oz. Failing this goal, the Treasury was to buy silver until a fourth of all U. S. bullion (in monetary value) was in silver. Last week the goal was still a mirage-some 60% of the world's gold is held...
...time when every crackpot scheme had a chance, a little bloc of Western silver-State Senators, by vote-trading, logrolling, wheedling, threatening, thrust the 1934 Act down the unwilling throats of Messrs. Franklin Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau Jr. Only some 2 5 mining companies profit under the Act, and half of them are controlled by Eastern capital. The largest, Sunshine Mining Co., is owned by Pacific Coast Lumbermen; eleven have headquarters in New York City, one in Boston, one in the Midwest. Except for wages, most of the silver subsidy returns to the East...
Congressional silverites in 1934 claimed that 400,000 men would be employed under the Act. At that time less than 3,000 men were mining silver; by 1937 only 56,000 were engaged in all gold & silver mining, only 118,000 in all U. S. metal mining. Silver is almost wholly a mining byproduct. The domestic subsidy has therefore merely paid overhead on many a mine, allowed it to keep open for the profitable production of copper, lead, zinc. Economists, who traditionally agree on nothing, to a man denounce the silver subsidy...