Posted on 02/05/2014 5:35:18 AM PST by SeekAndFind
With all this talk in Washington about income inequality, why isn't Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi — or anyone in the greed-and-envy lobby — going after the grotesquely unfair farm bill?
This near-$200 billion bill is one of the biggest giveaways to the rich and politically powerful in recent history.
Usually, in Washington Congress doles out taxpayer subsidies to industries that are in severe financial trouble — think of bailouts to autos, banks and steel. That's bad enough.
But the farm economy isn't in distress. It's booming, and agribusiness still walked away with $20 billion a year in direct payments, income support and crop insurance. We should call it the farming taxpayers bill.
Republicans and Democrats are joint partners in crime here, and they seem unconcerned that American families will now pay twice for food: at the grocery store and through their taxes. The pols also seem willfully ignorant to the reality that this will make the rich richer.
The latest Agriculture Department data indicate that last year the nation's 2.2 million farmers earned net income of $131 billion, or 7% more than the $113.8 billion in 2012. This was nearly double their 2009 incomes.
How many other Americans have doubled their income in five years? The average family has lost $2,000 of real income over that period.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
Question:
Doesn’t the farm bill include finanncing for food stamps (SNAP)?
Worse, it rewards rich Democrat actors and political hacks like Sam Donalson and Ted Turner, and even some Muslims who have found a place on that welfare gravy train that used to be a “farm program.”
The idea of subsidies was to protect and ensure the viability of family farms. Now all the subsidies are paid to giant multinational corporations and family farms have been swallowed by the leviathan.
But like any welfare program, once you put it into effect, there is no way to kill it.
Zombie Economics
I was posting her August through October that I wondered when Bohner would slam this one through, that was after the Farm bill failed in the summer because both Dems and conservatives voted against it.
Farm bills always get passed.
Legal Plunder Has Many Names - Bastiat
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole — with their common aim of legal plunder — constitute socialism.
http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html#SECTION_G020
Socialism Is Legal Plunder
Of course, the farm bill rewards millionaire “farmers”. All you need to know about any bill that gets passed by our rules in Washington is which constituents benefit and how they in turn can benefit the CongressCritter(s). Votes and money. SNAP generates votes. Money from Uncle Sugar generates campaign contributions from Cargill, Con-Agra and Archer Daniels Midland. The largest “family” farmers. In turn, said CongressCritter gets power and “campaign’ moneys that can later be laundered to expand his wealth. Wealth generated while in public office.
Yes. In fact, that has become its main purpose. And its biggest supporters are merchants who do landoffice business in SNAP card purchases - Walmart, the big grocery store chains, the snackfood and sugar water purveyors.
The number one thing that could have been done to protect the agricultural base, would have been to forego subsidies and implement zoning.
Farm land prices are not based so much on productivity, as on investment prices.
Subsidies for not farming, don’t pay enough for a farmer to make a living on, but they do go a long way in offsetting the investment costs of someone who was never going to farm the land to begin with. The net result being that land prices have gone up based on the government covering a percentage of the carrying cost.
No changes made in the Farm Bill in subsidies paid to cotton . Cotton Subsidies** 560,924,418 (2012)* - Down from $1,311,673,254 (2011)
Due to US cotton subsidies, the U.S. to pay $147.3 million a year to Brazil’s cotton farmers.
*(Don’t know if that amount includes the $147.3 million.)
Seems to me an adjustment would be in order.
Sugar subsidies are definitely a load of crap.
They have been in place for 50 years and make absolutely no sense.
The “rich farmers” got theirs.
Food stamp recipients got a 1% cut.
Look for the Dems and media to repeatedly beat us
about the head and shoulders with this fact.
Republicans do NOTHING to help themselves by continuing to embrace Crony Capitalism.
Funny how water isn’t considered food. We need water funding more than food funding. Eat vending machine food if you have to.
But it doesn’t. It cuts out all Direct Payments to farmers and the only ones who are getting anything are marketing and stuff, not real farmers.
The conservation part is just to pander to environazis and go something like...”you spend 20K and protect the rats and the rabbits and we’ll give you 2K.
The insurance is atrocious, you don’t pay much but unless you have a 100% loss and then you will see very little. They have these convoluted payout percentages which usually end up being less than the cost of the paper and time you put into filling out the forms. But, hey, if you’re a minority, you don’t even have to pay the premiums.
The farm bill is good for mega-farm companies, the forest service, the food stamp users, the environmentalists, and the government pencil pushers who make good wages.
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