Peanuts Begins by Charles Schulz for February 05, 2023

Wonderful, huh, Sherman?

You can tell this strip is old. Today there’d be more forms: wetlands, EPA, Labor, etc.

First Shermy appearance in a long time, he’s still not speaking here, he avoided the whole Charlotte Braun era too.

Teaching you financial responsibility while you play.

One must be venerable indeed to get this reference…

As a kid I remember getting deeds for a square foot of land in Alaska in cereal boxes, wonder if it is still good!

Later, Violet set up her own toy farm, and Charlie Brown’s kite landed on her tree.

Shermy the short-lived.

Who got the other 10%?

Well, this one took me down an interesting little economic rabbit hole and filled in a knowledge gap. I thought I remembered something about this when I was a kid, but it all went over my head. So I took to the google, and found “parity” was a New Deal economic plan meant to insure that commodity prices would insure the farmers could earn enough from their land to at least cover their crop costs. Back when it was initiated it was set at 100%. Then, when lending became fundamental to farming, in the 50s it was dropped to 90% so the farmer could earn enough to cover the interest on the loans and the elevator fees. it was a very important part of our national economic policy, that insured we had a good food supply at a fair price to the farmer. That all got swept away when the Tea Party “free market” Congress cut the ability of the government to limit imports of foreign commodities, allowing cheap Chinese and other imported crops to flood and depress the market price for our own domestically produced foods. A big reason why our farm and larger economy is faltering. Right now the parity index is around 30%!

No outhouses?

To complete the set…

http://www.farmtoysoutlet.com/1-64-case-ih-farm-toys-s/1513.htm