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Show THE THREE-RING CIRCUS 213 and he did not believe that the taxpayers of the United States were in a position to give the senators from Ari- zona a gift of two billion dollars. In his eleven years in the Senate, Downey had never seen large sums of money dealt with so carelessly as they were in S. 75, and he asserted that the bill was written so that the only limit on authorization was the blue sky.305 "The distinguished senators from Arizona," said Downey, "repeat and repeat and repeat, endlessly, as indeed they must if they are to save face, that this huge expenditure of money is proposed to be made to irrigate 750,000 acres of land. "Mr. President, that simply is not true . . . the acreage which will be irrigated by this entire project is admittedly 225,000 acres, almost wholly grain and cotton land" 306 Then Downey quoted a statement by McFarland, made at the hearings on the project, that without the project 226,000 acres of land would go out of production. Dividing 226,000 by the cost of the project resulted in a cost per acre of between $3,000 and $4,000 for grain land worth any place from $150 to $250 per acre with a full water supply. Downey declared that the Bureau of Reclamation's report on the Central Arizona Project was dishonest. He said: 307 "The Bureau of Reclamation, with the most phony, despicable figures the human mind could imagine, has worked out a formula to its satisfaction." Declaring he disliked to say how dishonest the Bureau's report was, Downey added: "They cannot have done this thing through ignorance or neglect. The men who prepared these figures knew they were doing something which, if they had done it as a private oper- |
