Next time you buy a bag of popcorn at the movie theater, or pop your own bag of Orville Redenbacher, thank the taxpayer, who’s picking up part of the tab.
Politico has an informative and entertaining story about the recent flap over popcorn subsidies, with a Romney advisor on the pro-popcorn welfare side, and John McCain on the free-markets-in-popcorn side.
An excerpt:
Thanks to friends in high places like Jim Talent — an adviser now to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign — popcorn acres have qualified for direct payments since 2003. Talent, back then a Republican senator from Missouri, took the lead for the industry in attaching an amendment to the 2003 agriculture appropriations bill, using this route to correct what he saw as an error in the 2002 farm bill.
“The correction is simple,” Talent told his colleagues. “Popcorn is simply treated as a variety of the traditional corn for the purposes of determining bases and yields.”
As a result, popcorn has enjoyed a rough parity with its Midwest field corn and soybean cousins, who have had a major hand now in writing the new ARC program. But jumping aboard this new train will be harder since popcorn is typically sold under contract and doesn’t fit easily into a revenue insurance program tied to commodity markets.
“The correction is simple,” Talent told his colleagues. “Popcorn is simply treated as a variety of the traditional corn for the purposes of determining bases and yields.”
As a result, popcorn has enjoyed a rough parity with its Midwest field corn and soybean cousins, who have had a major hand now in writing the new ARC program. But jumping aboard this new train will be harder since popcorn is typically sold under contract and doesn’t fit easily into a revenue insurance program tied to commodity markets.
