Posted on 05/29/2012 4:54:56 PM PDT by Libloather
Conservative groups target farm bill
By Erik Wasson - 05/29/12 04:40 PM ET
Conservative groups have made it official — they hate the Senate farm bill and will push Tea Party fiscal hawks in Congress to defeat it.
Heritage Action and Club for Growth on Tuesday told The Hill they will “key vote” the Senate farm bill that is coming up for passage in early June, punishing members on their annual scorecards for voting in favor of the bill.
“We’re against it. We haven’t key voted it yet, but we will eventually. I suspect that fiscally conservative resistance will be high, probably even higher than the highway bill,” said Club for Growth vice president Andrew Roth.
Heritage Action said it will key vote the Senate farm bill out of opposition to the new spending in the legislation on crop insurance, meant to cover farmers’ small losses. The group also believes the bill does not cut enough from food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
“Conservatives should not be distracted by the end of direct payments in the Senate farm bill. Not only does the bill funnel millions to specialty crops while creating a new and potentially costly subsidy in shallow loss insurance, it also fails to make necessary structural reforms to the SNAP program,” Heritage Action CEO Michael Needham said in an emailed statement.
Club for Growth and Heritage Action have played central roles in mobilizing conservatives in recent months, exerting particular influence with the large Tea Party caucus.
The groups were instrumental this spring in killing House Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) five-year highway bill — the American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act — after arguing it spent too much.
Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said last week she has the 60 votes she needs to get a farm bill approved, but commodity groups are worried farm subsidies could be curtailed through conservative amendments.
In the House, conservative group opposition could scuttle plans to bring a farm bill to the floor before the current farm law expires Sept. 30. A farm bill was not on the summer agenda memo released last Friday by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).
The Senate farm bill reduces the deficit compared to current law by $23.6 billion, but a House GOP aide noted that the Republican Study Committee got $50 billion in savings, not including its block granting of the food stamp program.
The House Agriculture Committee’s eventual bill is likely to have even more spending on farm subsidies than the Senate bill.
Committee leaders are sympathetic to demands by Southern farmers growing peanuts and rice to include a more generous countercyclical payment plan in the House bill than that found in the Senate. This subsidy would pay farmers if crop prices dip below set target prices.
“As for countercyclical payments, I expect that conservatives will generally not be interested in lowering the bar for those subsidies,” the House aide said.
Congress = Gangsters
Every single “farm” subsidy needs to be completely eliminated. Period. The days of taking money from one group to give it to another are over.
Compete in a marketplace that's free from interference, and if you can't, your corporation/farm/business/etc. dies.
You and I are on the same page.
Even though we (on our farm) don’t participate in the farm program, there needs to be a safety net for two reasons:
Everyone here likes to eat.
Also, farmers gamble thousands maybe even millions every year on factors out of their control such as weather, pests and disease.
It’s not a business for the faint of heart, which is why a lot of people are out of it and their descendents know little about it.
That said, I’m sure farm programs show that they are produced by committees. Not perfect, but, we need some kind of safety net.
This post shows me that I need to read up on the latest farm bill and probably e-mail my congressman. I might or might not agree with Tea Party thoughts on it, can for darn sure give my congressman a grassroots view of it.
[ Every single “farm” subsidy needs to be completely eliminated. Period. The days of taking money from one group to give it to another are over. ]
especially since a LOT of subsidies go to the big agribusiness companies like Monsanto and ConAgra and ADM.
But they use scare the little Farmer into pressing their congress critters to vote for the disgrace that is the farm bill. They tell the little farmer, “All your money is gonna go away” and yet they tax the little farmer and then give the farmer’s money back to them after taking out a portion of it in “administrative costs” that the bureaucracy must feed on to survive. Then a lot of money gets sent to the big agribusiness making it easier for them to compete against any “upstart middle sized operators”.
If the playing field was “evened out” via simple common sense regulation and no special perks for ANYONE then you would have an environment where the big companies would choke on their own inefficiencies and they upstarts would take their place in a constant cycle of “birth, life, death” of companies. Instead we get a whole lot of old companies on “life support” in the name of regulations that stifle their competition and tax breaks/subsidies, while the small time farmers languish as “children with progeria” and die premature deaths or are aborted before they even start.
[ Every single “farm” subsidy needs to be completely eliminated. Period. The days of taking money from one group to give it to another are over. ]
Too many addicted farmers on the government teat...
They need to sell it as thusly:
No more farm subsidies and all small to medium sized farms have no income tax burden at all.
Farmer Joe pays 10,000 in taxes a year and gets 5,000 in subsidies and then whines about the tea party...
Farmer Joe would have more time on his hands if he paid only 5,000 in taxes and had more free time working the earth rather than spending hours in front of a g-damned calculator fiddling with government forms etc,...
All the “Farm Programs” since at least the 50’s should have been called by their honest name, “The Cheap Food for Consumers Bill”.
That’s what all those bills have in common, keeping food prices as low as possible. They’ve been very successful, more successful than any government cheap food program in the history of the world.
I'd hate to lose the federal crop insurance. We pay for it but it's reasonable. Last year, it was $2,042, 100% hail and wind and 75% drought. Last year there was drought but we got good enough yields in spite of it that we didn't have a claim for which I was thankful.
Here's 1/2 of the cost so far this year. Am nitrate custom applied last fall they deferred payment for me to Jan, 4035.31. By Sep 1 I have to pay just under $5,000 so we can get on a fall expense cycle. Remember this is 1/2. My tenant pays the other half.
100 acres corn seed my half this spring $5,107.60. So you can see what getting wiped out with hail would entail to try to replant. Bean seed for 70.21 acres was $1,900.08. Chemicals $3,502.68. Fertilizer (in addition to the am nitrate) $3,425. Then I have property taxes due, house needs a new roof, tuckpointing in the foundation and gravel. Then I have to pay costs at the elevator. This year it was a little over $200 because I sold everything in Jan so I would have plenty of working capital to try to stay on a cash basis. Last fall the 2011 crop storage and processing was over $1500 for about 2 months, and I lost 80 bu corn due to shrink when they dried it. They will only take corn and beans with so much of a percentage of moisture content.
Now this fall we're buying everything for 2013 because we get a fall discount. I have to call and check a couple items.
So that's a little about what a small farmer deals with. Big farmers have a lot of risk, too. Even more. Grain prices have been high, I sold a little too quickly and missed the nice spike in beans to $14 bu but corn stayed fairly steady from about $6 to $6.57 bu.
I got $6.18 for my corn which was deflating because they had the wrong screen up, it's like the stock market constantly changing and I said I wanted to sell at $6.23 which is what I saw on my screen and is what I said I wanted to sell it for. When I got the papers, it was the lesser amt, I called and argued with them but gave it up rather than alienate them for the future. There are other options I'm studying for a marketing strategy.
My tenant tells me all I do is write the checks which is true. But I have to study and plan. No I'm not out in an ac cab doing any field work. But it's still a big worry. To sell the capital gains tax would be horrific, worse if they let the Bush tax cuts expire and if the bank interest rates weren't so abysmal, I figure I can get a little better return by going through the above. Each year brings variations in problems.
I won't know until after taxes next year how well I've done so far.
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