There will be unmelted snowballs in Hades before this Congress agrees to cut out the pork in the farm bill headed for a vote within the next week, so President Bush should get his veto pen ready. At an estimated cost of at least $285 billion over 10 years, this will be the most expensive and regressive farm bill ever. Given how Congress uses budget gimmicks these days to hide the real costs of many of the bills it approves, that $285 billion figure is almost certainly too low. If there was a truth-in-spending law with real teeth in it, this Congress would have been hauled to the pokey long ago.
On Tuesday, four reformist House members wrote a letter explaining that the devil is in the details of the farm bill.
Democrats Ron Kind of Wisconsin and Jim Cooper of Tennessee joined Republicans Jeff Flake of Arizona and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin in pointing out that the cap on direct payments to landowners — which are based on total acreage rather than land actually used to grow real food — would rise from $40,000 to $50,000 per person. And remember those infamous subsidies that have gone to “farmers” like former ABC newsman Sam Donaldson, CNN founder Ted Turner and banker David Rockefeller? The farm bill allows subsidies for people making as much as $950,000 annually, and nearly $2 million for married couples.
Bush proposed limiting such subsidies to people making less than $200,000, then offered to compromise with a $500,000 annual cap. Congress refused.
Clearly, Congress is determined to undo what little remains of past farm program reforms. The direct payments mentioned earlier are one example: Under the 1996 Freedom to Farm bill, the payments were to replace crop subsidies. But when subsequent Republican-controlled Congresses resurrected the subsidies, they kept the direct payments, turning an “either/or” proposition into a doubly expensive “both/and” deal. Similarly, in 2002, Congress approved a crop insurance program to protect farmers from natural disasters.
The present bill keeps the insurance program, but adds retroactive disaster relief for crop losses in 2005, 2006 and 2007 — which the 2002 crop insurance program supposedly already covered. The bill likely headed for Bush’s desk also expands corn ethanol biofuel subsidies, even as food costs spiral, and adds new price supports for sugar. This bill is a sweet deal for agribusiness conglomerates, alternative energy profiteers, and wealthy absentee farmers who’ve never sat on a John Deere tractor, but it will leave a bitter taste for taxpayers for years to come.
