Volume XX No.23: June 05, 2015
Another day older and deeper in debt. That’s Tennessee Ernie Ford’s answer in his 1955 hit, \”Sixteen Tons.\” The song chronicles the life of a miner of \”Number Nine Coal.\” He reckons that he can’t die yet because, \”I owe my soul to the company store.\”
They evidently weren’t in northeastern Pennsylvania, because just six years after Ford’s hit, a handful of local lawmakers cooked up a scheme to boost the anthracite coal industry. In May 1961 the American taxpayer started to pay to ship American coal to power U.S. bases in Germany. Half a century later, taxpayers are still paying to ship coal and that earned the House and Senate Appropriations Committees a \”Golden Fleece.\”
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