American Boondoggle: Fixing the Farm Bill
There was no 2012 farm bill. Instead, in the fiscal cliff negotiations, Senator Mitch McConnell and Vice President Joe Biden agreed to an extension of the 2008 farm bill through September 31, 2013, with the expectation that a new farm bill will be written in 2013. The delay was a real blessing for taxpayers, who would have been stuck with paying for a potentially exorbitantly expensive set of new “shallow loss”, insurance, and price support farm subsidy programs if the House and Senate Agricultural Committees’ 2012 farm policy proposals had become law. But now attention has turned to the 2013 farm bill, with congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle searching for inefficient, wasteful and outdated programs where federal spending can and should be cut. For seven decades or more, for the most part federal farm programs have consisted of an array of subsidies, regulations, spending programs, and land-use restrictions that waste economic resources, transfer tax payer dollars mainly to rich landowners and wealthy farmers, generate environmental degradation, impose fiscal burdens, and are largely responsible the failure of global trade negotiations. These inefficient and outdated policies are once again up for renewal. They deserve to be heavily scrutinized, and most of them probably scrapped, especially at a time when federal budget deficits have simply become unsustainable.
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The House of Representatives has now passed a farm bill on an entirely partisan basis. No Democrat voted for the bill, not least because the House leadership voted out the nutrition title that would have reauthorized food stamps, or Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program.
The 2013 Farm Bill presents a real opportunity for substantive changes in U.S. agricultural policy. But instead of reform, both the House and Senate agricultural committees are offering classic bait-and-switch proposals to protect farm subsidies - more than 80 percent of which flow to households much wealthier than the average American family.
The farm bill moving through Congress today provides a great reminder of how Washington works: Whenever you see a government subsidy for some sympathetic cause or group - such as the working man, green-energy, homeownership, or college - there's a good chance that the financial industry is also pocketing taxpayer cash through the same program.
Over the weekend, the cartoonish ‘March Against Monsanto' played out in many cities across the United States and the world, invariably to small crowds-although the organizers and anti-biotech NGOs did their best to claim inflated numbers in an attempt to garner headlines.
Five standing or permanent disaster programs were established by the 2008 Farm Bill but were only funded through the end of 2011.
The Department of Agriculture Administration Building sits next to the Smithsonian. It ought to be a museum, too.
When somebody else pays for their drinks, most partygoers find they want and need more than a modest amount to drink because at an open bar, the cost of a drink is the time spent waiting in line for service. At a cash bar, lines are shorter because most people find they just don’t need that much to drink when they have to pay for it. What holds for drinks also holds for crop insurance.
Congress was unable to pass a farm bill in 2012 because of disagreements on policy and funding levels. With farm bill action expected soon in the Senate and House Agriculture Committees, what should farm subsidy programs look like?
