As negotiators wrangle over reconciling the Farm Bill, which Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, says won't be finished until after Election Day, a pair of longtime ag policy columnists consider some of the issues it tackles through the words of Henry A. Wallace, whom they call their intellectual mentor.
In his book 60 Million Jobs, Wallace "offers some principles to his 1945 audience that resonate today," Harwood D. Schaffer and Daryll E. Ray write for their Agricultural Policy Analysis Center column. Wallace was President Truman's secretary of commerce when the book was published, but had been Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of agriculture, then his, vice president, and was called "the philosopher of the New Deal."
Wallace argued that the U.S. needed to provide 60 million jobs by 1950 to transition the country from a wartime to a peacetime economy. Those jobs "produce 200 billion dollars’ worth of goods and services…with a distribution of wages that will leave no family and no individual beyond the benefits of this abundant national production," he wrote.
Wallace also argued that the U.S. must "squarely face the problem of racial and religious discrimination and propaganda-bred hatred" and acknowledge women's equality in the workplace in order to "attain full employment and lasting peace at home."
Though some things have changed in the U.S. since Wallace published his book, "his vision for an America in which all people share fully in its abundance is as relevant today as it was 73 years ago," Schaffer and Ray write.
In his book 60 Million Jobs, Wallace "offers some principles to his 1945 audience that resonate today," Harwood D. Schaffer and Daryll E. Ray write for their Agricultural Policy Analysis Center column. Wallace was President Truman's secretary of commerce when the book was published, but had been Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of agriculture, then his, vice president, and was called "the philosopher of the New Deal."
Wallace argued that the U.S. needed to provide 60 million jobs by 1950 to transition the country from a wartime to a peacetime economy. Those jobs "produce 200 billion dollars’ worth of goods and services…with a distribution of wages that will leave no family and no individual beyond the benefits of this abundant national production," he wrote.
Wallace also argued that the U.S. must "squarely face the problem of racial and religious discrimination and propaganda-bred hatred" and acknowledge women's equality in the workplace in order to "attain full employment and lasting peace at home."
Though some things have changed in the U.S. since Wallace published his book, "his vision for an America in which all people share fully in its abundance is as relevant today as it was 73 years ago," Schaffer and Ray write.
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