More for the Poor

Strange are the consequences which will follow Secretary Wickard's modest proposal to solve the meat shortage by limiting everybody to a uniform ration of two and a half pounds a week per person.

Rationing meat is a very different problem from rationing sugar. The poor normally eat almost as much sugar as the rich, and so rationing everybody to the same amount of sugar per week made sense. Meat, on the other hand, is a food which the rich normally consume over three times as much of as the poor.

Based on 1941 figures, when the low-income classes probably ate the best food in their lives, people with incomes under $500 ate less than one and a half pounds of meat each week--and mostly cheap pork cuts at that. Those with incomes under $2,000 ate about two and a quarter pounds. For more than 50% of U.S. citizens the meat-rationing scheme means eating more meat than ever before.

Secretary Wickard spoke of his plan as a 25% reduction in meat-eating. But people with incomes over $5,000 normally eat almost four pounds of meat a week. For them his program will mean not a 25% reduction but a 40% cut.

Meanwhile a flock of knotty problems were whirling about OPA offices, keeping the enforcement staff in a tizzy. Swift's price ceiling for beef turned out to be 21 1/2 -c- a pound; Wilson's, 21-c-; Armour's, 20 1/2 -c-. Obviously such a disparity could not last long, for no butcher will go on indefinitely paying Swift 1-c- a pound more than Armour just because that differential happened to exist on the date meat prices were frozen last March.

Also, OPA decided most of the big packers were chiseling, cracked down on 100 of them for upgrading meat and for short-weighing butchers to get around the price ceiling. The packers indignantly denied the charges, but the Government said it had unearthed "a widespread and well-organized campaign to flout price control regulations." To bolster enforcement, OPA licensed packers & wholesalers (retailers are already licensed), brought the whole industry under control.

All this left one thing plain: on anything as variable as meat, either rationing or price enforcement will always be a headache.

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