Pathetic. Craven. Irresponsible. Unprincipled. Those and similar adjectives apply to every member of Congress who voted for the bloated, anti-consumer piece of legislative corruption known as the Food and Energy Conservative Act of 2008 a k a as “the farm bill.” President Bush has promised to veto the bill. To put it plainly, everybody in Congress who votes to override the coming Bush veto should be retired come November because they will have voted for a measure that is nothing more — or less — than a $300 billion giveaway of the taxpayers’ hard-earned money. This is especially true for conservative Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats who brag about their fiscal rectitude.
We’ve already editorialized that the bill is a budge buster even without the grab bag of spending gimmicks. We’ve noted that it will continue to give subsidies to millionaires who actually live in Manhattan and who might not even use their “farmland” for food crops. (Those subsidies will come from tax dollars confiscated from millions of working families of four making, say, $35,000. How is that fair?) But we actually understated the expense and duplicity of providing retroactive “disaster relief” for crop losses for which the 2002 farm bill previously covered in advance through federal crop insurance. As it turns out, the bill also keeps the crop insurance going forward, plus provides $3.8 billion in advance for any unforeseen “disasters” that may, uh, crop up.
On these pages last Friday, columnist Tim Carney described how the bill increases subsidies for domestic sugar growers that, combined with restrictions on imported sugar, will drive up U.S. food prices substantially — and, even worse, how it provides for the government to buy “excess” sugar at high prices, then re-sell it to ethanol facilities at as little as one-tenth the price.
There also are inexcusable local-interest flimflams such as a $250 million tax credit for a private land sale in Montana and a provision to “sell” national forest land, necessitating a shifting of the Appalachian Trail, to benefit a Vermont ski resort. Worse — and this is brand new — House and Senate negotiators “air-dropped” several expensive provisions into the bill that neither chamber had voted on, including $170 million for salmon fisheries in California. Then there is yet another fuel subsidy, this one for “cellulosic” ethanol, at a five-year cost to taxpayers of $348 million. All of this, at a time when the federal deficit this year is expected to hit $400 billion and the federal debt approaches $9.4 trillion. In short, this bill is so stuffed that it deserves to be named by an agricultural term — bull, uh, manure.
