http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsTpkFbsGOI
Kaptain Korn!
Posted on 01/28/2014 4:27:52 PM PST by jazusamo
Subsidies: Former Indiana congressman (and now state governor) Mike Pence used to quip that he was 99% capitalist but 1% socialist, and that turns socialist "when it comes time to vote on a farm bill." At least he was honest.
Just what is it about farm bills that make Republicans abandon their principles of limited government and fiscal restraint? The sad answer: Farm bills are classic examples of Republican pork delivered to their own voters.
The $1 trillion bill that will be voted on this week is another big pail of slop. It includes subsidies for corn, cotton, wool, sugar, peanuts, dairy farmers, catfish farms, Christmas tree growers and even farmers' markets. And it's a setback on nearly every policy front.
Let's start with the near-$800 billion food stamps component. The GOP strategy from the start was to finally separate food stamps from farm payments to break the so-called unholy alliance between urban Democrats — who want more welfare spending — and farm state Republicans who want more crop subsidies.
This devil's bargain always resulted in more of both, and the taxpayers were the big losers.
Republicans in the House won a giant victory earlier this year by separating the farm bill from food stamps for the first time in decades.
This promised less spending for both programs, but now the bills in the House-Senate conference have been reunited and it's back to normal break-the-bank budgeting.
Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues, as well as the poverty lobby in Washington, went ballistic when the original House Republican bill proposed a modest 5% "cut" in a program that has quadrupled in cost over the last decade and that now ensnares 47 million Americans — or almost one in seven families — on the food dole.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
gop has been abandoning principles annually for decades
Duh. Nobody goes after subsidy-filled farm bills, except Pete DuPont. Anybody but me remember Pete DuPont?
Are there any principles left to abandon?
If so, name one?
Good point, the GOPe have abandoned them.
They’re all whores.
Farm bills are where politicians, farmers, and every merchant who profits from EBT cards holds the taxpayer down by the neck and strips him of everything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsTpkFbsGOI
Kaptain Korn!
Why not cut farm subsidies by 10% and give all farmers a 10% tax cut, the amount you could save in bureaucracy would save a few billion....
But.. Nooooo
Gotta feed their Kronies in ADM and ConAgra, who get sweetheart deals via subsidies while the middle and small farmer gets table scrap subsidies to keep voting democraps..
The socialist Republican leadership have no values to abandon, the leadership and most Republicans in the House and Senate are all in agreement with their friends the democrats.
I tire of these idiots who keep chanting the empty phrase “they have abandoned their beliefs” or a variation of that non-sense. They are all part of big government socialism.
Even Rush chants this BS to the under informed...
My brother-in-law used to say the only piece of equipment a farmer needed was a hat so he didn’t get sun burned on his way to the mailbox to pick up his government check.
LOL
Ha! Your BIL was probably right. :-)
Farm subsidies are not just a waste of tax dollars from a budgetary standpoint. Welfare for farmers is used by Dems to justify their own liberal boondoggles. Farm aid is a complete economic and political disaster.
These Republicans are gonna come back to their district and claim to be Conservative just like Lamar Alexander.
yep.
how about no ag subsidies, just make it a non-taxed industry
I don't know what the farm bill does, but it's likely that there is a far more serious problem with the bill than subsidies.
More specifically, the Supreme Court has historically clarified, in terms of the 10th Amendment nonetheless, that the states have never delegated to Congress, via the Constitution, the specific power to regulate agriculture. Here's the relevant excerpt.
“From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited. None to regulate agricultural production is given, and therefore legislation by Congress for that purpose is forbidden (emphasis added).” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
There was an amendment put into the Farm Bill yesterday that brought many of the Western Republicans around to voting for it. For those of you who don’t know this, the Fed Govt doesn’t pay property taxes to states that have large sections of Federal land. Instead they get something called PILT(Payment in Lieu of Taxes).
“Payments in Lieu of Taxes” (or PILT) are Federal payments to local governments that help offset losses in property taxes due to non-taxable Federal lands within their boundaries. The key law is Public Law 94-565, dated October 20, 1976. This law was rewritten and amended by Public Law 97-258 on September 13, 1982 and codified at Chapter 69, Title 31 of the United States Code. The Law recognizes that the inability of local governments to collect property taxes on Federally-owned land can create a financial impact.
PILT payments help local governments carry out such vital services as firefighting and police protection, construction of public schools and roads, and search-and-rescue operations. The payments are made annually for tax-exempt Federal lands administered by the BLM, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (all agencies of the Interior Department), the U.S. Forest Service (part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture), and for Federal water projects and some military installations.
These PILT payments were not included in the main budget passed earlier this month. The Fed govt owns much of the land in states like AZ, NM, MT, WY, UT, and NV. The states then divide up this money to the counties, who are ultimately responsible for carrying out the services the Feds require on the land. Without this money many of these counties(who are mostly rural) would go bankrupt.
Many of the western Senators and Representatives have been hammered for this not getting put in the budget, so some moron( a Dem) thought that a good way of getting these guys to vote for this bloated Farm Bill would be to include these PILT payments.
[ how about no ag subsidies, just make it a non-taxed industry ]
Even better!
And cut some of the regulations that are squeezing out small and medium farmers in favor of huge company farms that can afford lawyers to fight the EPA.
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