We don't need the guvmit to help rich farmahs grow mo ethanol ... we don't need no mo ethanol. We get plenty of oil for Ahmericah from our Middle East friends.
Posted on 05/21/2008 10:22:56 AM PDT by SmithL
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush vetoed the $300 billion farm bill on Wednesday, calling it a tax increase on regular Americans at a time of high food prices in the face of a near-certain override by Congress.
It was the 10th veto of Bush's presidency. But since it passed both houses of Congress with veto-proof majorities, his action will likely be overridden.
The president believes the legislation is fiscally irresponsible and gives away too much money to wealthy farmers, yet his criticism rang hollow with lawmakers from both parties who voted for increased crop subsidies, food stamps for the poor and other goodies to help their districts in an election year.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said lawmakers should think twice before they override Bush's veto.
"Members are going to have to think about how they will explain these votes back in their districts at a time when prices are on the rise," she said. "People are not going to want to see their taxes increase."
Perino said the bill is $20 billion over the current baseline — "way too much to ask taxpayers right now."
"This bill is bloated," she said. "When grocery bills are on the rise, Congress is asking families to pay more in subsidies to wealthy farmers at a time of record farm profits."
In announcing Bush's veto, White House budget director Jim Nussle said Bush rejected it because it increases federal spending. He said Americans are frustrated with wasteful government spending and the funneling of taxpayer funds to pet projects. "This only worsens the frustration that they will feel," Nussle said, adding that Congress should extend the current farm bill.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Eight years to find the pen.
Oh no! Now BIG FARM is out for me!
It seems so long ago, when George sold himself as the conservative candidate of choice. Most of us bought it (myself included), but what a disappointment, fiscally speaking.
Six years.
When the veto override gets passed and neither gas or food prices lower President Bush can say, “I told you so”.
Class warfare from the President?
Life just keeps getting weirder.
He vetoed the stupid SCHIP bill as well. Better late than never, I guess.
Absolutely! Good job President Bush!
Wouldn’t this be the perfect opportunity for The Republican House Members to show us how serious they are about sticking to their new found Conservative Manifesto.
WHY DON”T THESE SPINELESS MORONS SUPPORT THIS VETO?
Nah... never happen!
From the article...
From the article: “ . . . almost $30 billion would go to farmers to idle their land . . . “
This is nonsensical to me.
Bash Bush, it’s the in thing.
All the cool kids are doing it. :P
An interesting phenomenon. A couple of years ago it was not uncommon to see sarcastic “Bush’s Fault” posts in response to the propencity of liberals to blame Bush for everything.
My how far FR has come. We are Devo.
yep........
BUMP!!
Class warfare from the President? Life just keeps getting weirder.
Your post is weird. Read the word "subsidies"...
READING COMPREHENSION? -- Get some!
Yeppers! One of the reasons I don't hang out here as much these days. I can go anywhere for the BDS take of the day.
The first veto wasn’t that long ago. It was the stem cell bill in 2006.
It will be overridden. Bet on it.
Most people seem to completely forget that Food Stamps make up over 65% of that $300 billion, and there is no way that the Congress is going to allow the food stamp program to drop.
Irrelevant, as that is not what you posted!
They should cease ethanol production along with this.
Good for President Bush!
Now watch the useless whiners carp *against* Bush rather than spend any time calling their Congressmen to support this veto.
Baaaa....bash Bush...Baaa...Baaa...the sheep must Baaash Bush.
This post (<-click), while addressing taxes, helps to explain why members of Congress who approved the farm bill are actually in contempt of the Constitution that they have sworn to defend, foolishly following in the footsteps of FDR's dirty federal spending politics.
The people need to reconnect with the Founder's division of federal and state government powers. The people then need to wise up to the major problem that, since the days of FDR's dirty politics, Congress has not been operating within the restraints of the federal Constitution, particularly where constitutionally unauthorized federal spending is concerned.
The bottom line is that the people need to get in the faces of members of Congress, demanding a stop to constitutionally unauthorized federal spending while appropriately lowering federal taxes - or get out of DC.
Lincoln put it this way.
"We the People are the rightful master of both congress and the courts - not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution." --Abraham Lincoln, Political debates between Lincoln and Douglas, 1858.
Good for Bush.
Bush Cheney 2008
You got it!
Your point is correct. But I believe it’s only 20% of USDA budget that goes to subsidy payments while 80% goes to food programs, WIC, School lunch etc.
Considered that way, 20% to support America’s farmers (wealthy and large or struggling and small) in their highly risky and expensive business doesn’t seem all that much.
They’re not going to support a veto. Period. Doesn’t matter what. There’s far too many of them who are in a position where they could be lambasted in their local press as being a cruel, despotic Republicans for voting down food stamps if they shoot down this bill and no new bill is introduced to cover it.
Remember, when Republicans refuse to increase the rate of growth in welfare programs, they’re evil. And that’s what has happened in this Farm Bill — the liberals added a big chunk of money into the food stamp program - an additional $10 billion.
The best thing that could happen is that the GOP gets a clue and takes food stamps away from the USDA and gives the program to the HHS, so that the cost of welfare is collected into one place where it can be seen for what it is.
Bush vetoed this because it would be overridden by the Congress. It is a cheap and cynical ploy by Bush to look as tho he’s standing up to spending in Congress, when he knows that if his veto stuck, he’d just bring down more crying and sobbing in the press from the Democrats about how heartless Republicans are.
The Republicans had no fewer than three major opportunities to put the food stamp program over into HHS, and they’ve always refused. Now they’re going to pay the price for not having cleaned up long-term issues while they were in power.
It’s not a “cheap and cynical ploy” by Bush. He vetoed the pork bill. He did his part, and that’s *all* that he can do. You’re denying credit where it’s due.
Somehow you’re still stuck in “Baaaaash Bush” mode, as if your herd was calling you baaaaack.
There was going to be a farm bill passed. Period. There wasn’t any doubt about that. A farm bill comes up every five years, like clockwork.
Where was the Bush administration on this bill in the last year? AWOL. He could have been working the phones, he could have been leading the GOP delegation on several particular issues where the Congress was plumping up the bill.
So where was he? Nowhere to be seen or heard from on this bill.
Without much surprise, the bill passed both houses with veto-proof majorities, and the GOP participated with gusto in larding the thing up.
Now Bush, at the very end of this process, makes a veto threat, which he did, on a bill with a veto-proof majority.
A cheap ploy, as I said. If he could lead (which he obviously cannot), he would have had the GOP lined up behind his position before it cleared either house, and the veto would stick.
Bush is a terrible leader on legislation. If it doesn’t involve creating a new entitlement or allowing millions of third worlders to flood over our borders, Bush doesn’t care about legislation.
Grain crops see big 2007 value increases By Bonnie Coblentz MSU Ag Communications MISSISSIPPI STATE -- Corn, wheat and grain sorghum in Mississippi posted triple-digit increases in 2007, and corn yielded near a record high as it topped cotton to reach an estimated value of $438 million. Corn rose 309 percent in estimated value to $438 million in 2007, and joined soybeans in posting higher estimated values than cotton, which traditionally holds the No. 3 spot in Mississippi agriculture behind No. 1 poultry and No. 2 forestry. Wheat increased 514 percent to reach an estimated value of $93 million, and grain sorghum gained 942 percent on 2006 figures for an estimated 2007 value of $28 million.
Grain Crops See Record Price Increases
And that's just one state. So when will they bring Big Farm up to Washington and scream at them about the price of rice and bread at taxpayer's expense? What a bunch of maroons.
With such a huge increase in minimum wage and less than 4% unemployment, what do we need a food stamp program for anyway, much less to increase it. Send the food stamp mothers to the farmers to pick the crops now that the illegals are all self-deporting.
Bush only vetoed this because he knows it will be over ridden. Hes the most profligate spending POS POTUS since Johnson. Phony baloney.
I didn't write that he had never vetoed. I used the word "stones" -- as in "cojones" -- implying bills that he should have had the GUTS to veto, but didn't. Bills for which he should have used the word "irresponsible" long before now. Allow me to refresh your memories.....
Bloated highway bill, bloated farm bill, Medicare Part D, McCain-Feingold, Kennedy's education bill.... Need I go on? Not to mention his support of the "comprehensive immigration" bill that was vetoed instead by the American public.....
July 2006 Stem Cell Bill Gets Bush’s First Veto
You see food is too cheap, and the corporate farmers need protection from lower profits.
Oh please. You are such an opportunist. Show me, with a link, one single post where *you* warned what to properly do on the farm bill in advance, even days, much less your claimed “5 years.”
Silence.
You can sit here *after* the fact and post as if you are some know it all, but the truth is that you are just some nobody who did less than anyone else, except whine and moan like a spoiled little girl who didn’t have roses line her path every day.
You certainly aren’t helping sustain Bush’s veto of this pork, and are in fact part of the problem by carping against Bush rather than fighting the good fight to deep-six this pork laden bill.
You wrote:
Well, whaddya know? George finally found his veto stones -- it took him only 7.5 years....
"Implying" he had never vetoed a bill before. That is the only thing I addressed.
Since the enemedia, along with the courts, are running this country I say we abolish the Executive and Legislative branches of government and get on with it.
That would accomplish two things;
1. The deficit would disappear almost overnight without all the high salaries and benefit packages for the civil "servants"
2. We could just admit this is how the country is being run and end all the silly games pretending that this country is anything other than a tyranny.
Good for the President. Kill the pork.
Why would I bother talking about this stuff to you people here on FR, the vast majority of whom so obviously don’t know a thing about farming, much less farm bills, when I could be using my time on ag policy:
a) talked to my Congressman, Senator and USDA reps in the last (and prior years),
b) talking with fellow farmers, who actually know their posteriors from this particular warm rock?
The facts on this bill go like this: ordinary farmers don’t matter. The majority of farmers in the US don’t take payments and mostly want to be left alone.
Farmers, as individuals, get very little say in the ongoing farm bills. What happens in Farm Bills happens mostly behind closed doors. Oh, sure, there are hearings. There’s a dog and pony show where the SecAg goes on the road and has a “listening tour” around the country. Whoopie. When you’re a farmer sitting in one of these meetings, you can tell that this is just another federal government dog-n-pony show.
The food stamp spending is largely on auto-pilot, and a change in parties decides whether the increase in food stamp spending reflects inflation or is above the official rate of inflation.
CRP (what so many people here on FR like to call “paying farmers to not farm”) is a program where the larger influence comes from conservation and game groups rather than farmers. If you want to point fingers for the creation of CRP, then you should be pointing your fingers at groups like Ducks Unlimited. The “payments to not farm” aren’t exactly what you could call generous. They’re just enough to induce farmers to put aside things like “prairie potholes” and riparian buffer areas to not be farmed, just to be left as-is.
Then we get to programs like LDP, where lenders to farmers have as much or more say than farmers. But lenders can talk through non-ag channels, and usually do.
Finally, we get to direct payments, which applies to only certain crops, often in geographically limited areas. Many of these programs are influenced by large corporations, large co-ops and commodity groups (eg, cotton). This is an area where finally farmers (in groups) get to start having any actual influence.
The rest of the bill is rural economic development, and the big influences there will be state and local pols. I’ve talked extensively with state politicians in Nevada on how absurdly rigged the economic development programs are and how the USDA defines “rural” in some humorously absurd ways.
I’ve dealt with the USDA and the seemingly Kafka-esque bureaucracy of same. I’ve seen the reality of the situation pretty close, thank you very much.
The reality is, if you want to effect change in the Farm Bill, you need to start buttonholing members of the Ag committees a year in advance, you need to start buttonholing members of Congress when the bill gets reported out of committee, and you need to ride herd on Congress especially when it goes to conference. Bush did none of this.
And more to the point, the GOP was the bunch that created the current mess that has cost us far, far more in subsidies than the FDR era programs did. The GOP put in “Freedom to Farm” in ‘96, commodity prices promptly tanked, the GOP rushed in with one “emergency appropriation” after another for bail-outs and they haven’t cleaned up the mess they’ve made since.
When farm bills go to conference, this is where they get loaded up with all manner of goodies and trinkets - because members of Congress know, a priori, that a veto that actually sticks, or a bill that doesn’t pass when the GOP is in the majority, can be hung around the neck of the GOP as “heartless GOP cuts food stamps!” This is where Bush, more than anywhere else, needed to get the GOP members of Congress onto the same page and keep them from loading up the bill with GOP pork. This, Bush has utterly failed to do and this is completely consistent with how Bush and the GOP have lost their majority.
So, pray tell, what have you done with respect to farm policy?
My point is that you are an opportunistic, ex-post-facto critic.
You haven’t mentioned word-one about what to do correctly on the Farm Bill prior to this week, yet you feel free to use *hindsight* to criticize the man who just vetoed that pork as if he hadn’t done enough.
Yours is the ranting of a spoiled child...complaining about her parents being too strict for putting her on a diet after she’s ballooned up to 300 pounds...offering no positive contributions/ideas prior to said weight gain (in this case, in the budget).
Oh, because I can point out facts, I’m an “ex-post-facto critic?”
And because you haven’t been party to what I have done, the old-fashioned way, (ie, by being something a tad more substantive than a keyboard warrior here on FR), you claim that I didn’t do anything prior to this week.
Yea, right. I’ll give you credit for gall.
As I said: I haven’t bothered to talk about the farm bill here on FR because, quite frankly, there’s only perhaps three other people I’ve met here on FR who know a shovel from a hoe. You’re most obviously not one of those three.
Want to know how I know, for a fact, that Bush didn’t do jack-all on this bill?
Roy Blount voted for this bill. Whip. Whipped *for* the bill.
Adam Putnam voted for this bill. GOP conference chair.
Then go back and look at how Bush dealt with the Farm Bill in 2002 (remember, I said that these things come around every five years). Bush signed it into law - and it was a massive increase in farm bill spending over prior bills. The 2002 bill was the start of a huge expansion of using the USDA as a catch-all rural development agency. I spoke out against that bill to the Nevada GOP members of Congress back then, too.
The reason why I know so much about how the Farm Bill actually works is because each farm bill is dreaded by farmers in Nevada, where Harry Reid uses the farm bills to help the Feds buy out more farmers’ water and use it for some silly environmentalist damp dream. I’ve seen how the Farm Bill game works; I’ve been in the same room with the Dean of the School of Ag at UNR when the announcement came through in the local press that the school was getting $70 million in some grant to acquire water rights and set up some desert research center - which the university never wanted, never knew about, didn’t know what to do with. The Dean of Ag was completely blindsided.
Harry Reid just parachuted the provision into the 2002 bill in a 2005 follow-on spending measure in conference. The Dean thought that the legislation was a huge liability, because it put a land grant university at odds with the farmers the school was supposed to serve by directing the university to buy up water rights and take them away from ag lands.
Bush signed that into law. Didn’t matter how many calls he got. Didn’t matter how spitting mad farmers were. Didn’t matter that Reid was (then) not the leader of the senate, and that the GOP could have blocked the move if they’d paid attention.
Bush signed the 2002 farm bill, despite the fact that is was only marginally smaller than this bill. The GOP passed it. It was a huge increase over prior farm bills... just like this one.
I’ve been around this game before. I’ve seen how Bush has handled himself around the issue. When he could have made a veto stick (2002), and when he could have done some real good for taxpayers by making a veto. He didn’t say much at all. Just signed it and allowed the spending to balloon upwards.
Dude!
You’re a freaking nobody.
You said nothing on this forum prior to the Farm Bill being vetoed, and now you are criticizing Bush for vetoing the bill because in your tiny little mind, he didn’t do enough (even though you weren’t saying squat prior to passage).
That makes you an ex-post-facto critic who uses hindsight to enable unlimited criticism of every action...a cheap shot.
You can *claim* that you are doing things off of this forum, but quite frankly, *everybody* on the internet can *claim* to be a political bigshot while anonymously online...just like every girl is beautiful online and every guy is infinitely tough, brilliant, and fabulously wealthy online...it’s called Internet Delusional Disorder.
And you’ve got it.
Bad.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.