Posted on 06/28/2012 6:11:53 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Senate-Passed Farm Bill Is 80 Percent Food Stamps By Matt Cover June 28, 2012 Subscribe to Matt Cover's posts
(CNSNews.com) – Nearly 80 percent of the nearly $1 trillion Farm Bill will fund an expanded food stamp program that is projected to offer increased benefits long after economists expect the economy will have recovered.
The bill, which passed the Senate June 21 on a 64-35 vote, would cost $969 billion over the next decade – mostly for food stamps.
Food stamps – formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – account for $768 billion of the bill’s ten-year total, or 79 percent of the Senate bill’s total funding. “In total, CBO estimates that enacting the [SNAP] provisions…would cost $768.2 billion,” The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said in a June estimate of the bill.
The remaining 11 percent goes to fund the myriad of federal farm subsidies that give the Farm Bill its name, such as wetland conservation programs, price supports, and crop insurance.
The bill also locks in higher food stamp spending long after the recession is likely to have ended – keeping spending higher than its pre-recession levels.
From 2007 to 2011 food stamp spending more than doubled, going from $30 billion to $72 billion, according to the CBO, far outpacing the rise in the unemployment rate over that time.
In the current Farm Bill – which reauthorizes farm subsidies for five years – food stamp spending remains elevated, spending a recession-like average of $79 billion per year. However, the bill only authorizes spending through 2017, meaning Congress will need to revisit the issue of food stamp spending at that time.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
The best Food Stamp is a $20 bill that was not extracted from someone else’s pocket.
French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) said, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody
endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” That endeavor has plagued mankind throughout his history and has
now reached a crisis stage in Western Europe and the United States, and the prospects for reversing it don’t appear
to be promising.
SOURCE:http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/11/OurMoralDilemma
Urban eaters keep whining about the huge farm bills. They should be aware that farmers get very little support from the government, and most of those who do are in the “green” farming programs that are currently in fashion.
Some day there will be a shortage of farmers, who will get tired of being kicked around and will sell their acreage to developers. Then there will be no more need for food stamps because you can’t eat food stamps.
One of the first things Obama did after getting in to office was to raise the food stamp benefit amount across the board by about 18%. Add that to the explosive growth of people getting on food stamps and you get these big numbers.
The food stamp fraud is incredible. Fixing the problem is easy as it is for all welfare. Commercial databases already have the information in them to needs test. For example, if the person getting aid has a vehicle loan or a mortgage then they should be disqualified. Another very simple thing the feds could do simply require every state to dump a list of the social security numbers for every recipient. Then compare them. If there are duplicates do an investigation. They can use the people that were to be hired to monitor the Obamacare garbage that should be overturned today.
Big Farm and Big Grocery now live in a symbiotic relationship with Big Government. It is never going away absent some sort of revolution.
Various quotes from
WALTER WILLIAMS at - http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles.html
“It is truly disgusting for me to hear politicians, national and international talking heads and pseudo-academics praising the Middle East stirrings as democracy movements. We also hear democracy as the description of our own political system. Like the founders of our nation, I find democracy and majority rule a contemptible form of government.”
“James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, said that in a pure democracy, “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Virginia Gov. Edmund Randolph said, “... that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” John Adams said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Alexander Hamilton said, “We are now forming a Republican form of government. Real Liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship.”
“To highlight the offensiveness to liberty that democracy and majority rule is, just ask yourself how many decisions in your life would you like to be made democratically. How about what car you drive, where you live, whom you marry, whether you have turkey or ham for Thanksgiving dinner? If those decisions were made through a democratic process, the average person would see it as tyranny and not personal liberty. Is it no less tyranny for the democratic process to determine whether you purchase health insurance or set aside money for retirement? Both for ourselves, and our fellow man around the globe, we should be advocating liberty, not the democracy that we’ve become where a roguish Congress does anything upon which they can muster a majority vote.
Suppose I saw an elderly woman painfully huddled on a heating grate in the dead of winter. She’s hungry and in need of shelter and medical attention. To help the woman, I walk up to you using intimidation and threats and demand that you give me $200. Having taken your money, I then purchase food, shelter and medical assistance for the woman. Would I be guilty of a crime? A moral person would answer in the affirmative. I’ve committed theft by taking the property of one person to give to another.
Most Americans would agree that it would be theft regardless of what I did with the money. Now comes the hard part. Would it still be theft if I were able to get three people to agree that I should take your money? What if I got 100 people to agree — 100,000 or 200 million people? What if instead of personally taking your money to assist the woman, I got together with other Americans and asked Congress to use Internal Revenue Service agents to take your money? In other words, does an act that’s clearly immoral and illegal when done privately become moral when it is done legally and collectively? Put another way, does legality establish morality? Before you answer, keep in mind that slavery was legal; apartheid was legal; the Nazi’s Nuremberg Laws were legal; and the Stalinist and Maoist purges were legal. Legality alone cannot be the guide for moral people. The moral question is whether it’s right to take what belongs to one person to give to another to whom it does not belong.
Obama gives key agriculture post to Monsanto man
Gary Ruskin 03.27.2010
Today, President Obama announced that he will recess appoint Islam A. Siddiqui to the position of Chief Agricultural Negotiator, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
Siddiqui is a pesticide lobbyist and Vice President for Science and Regulatory Affairs at CropLife America, an agribusiness lobbying group that represents Monsanto.
Now slackers can super size there junk food list and now they can have six meals a day.
Placemarker
There’s a “Tree” somewhere, which sorely needs “Refreshing”.
Government wants more people on food stamps
Written by TAMI LUHBY # CNNMoney Wednesday, 27 June 2012 20:13
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — More than one in seven Americans are on food stamps, but the federal government wants even more people to sign up for the safety net program.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been running radio ads for the past four months encouraging those eligible to enroll. The campaign is targeted at the elderly, working poor, the unemployed and Hispanics.
The department is spending between $2.5 million and $3 million on paid spots, and free public service announcements are also airing. The campaign can be heard in California, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, and the New York metro area.
http://thebeezbuzz.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=1&Itemid=62
Government wants more people on food stamps
Written by TAMI LUHBY # CNNMoney Wednesday, 27 June 2012 20:13
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — More than one in seven Americans are on food stamps, but the federal government wants even more people to sign up for the safety net program.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been running radio ads for the past four months encouraging those eligible to enroll. The campaign is targeted at the elderly, working poor, the unemployed and Hispanics.
The department is spending between $2.5 million and $3 million on paid spots, and free public service announcements are also airing. The campaign can be heard in California, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, and the New York metro area.
http://thebeezbuzz.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=1&Itemid=62
Democrats should be gung ho for robots because for the first time in history there will finally be a worker class that doesn't mind having everything stolen from them. The Democrats should fund robotics development like they do food stamps. But they won't because it means mostly high paying jobs of white male engineers that don't overwhelmingly vote Democrat.
I know you're thinking of Monsanto and ADM and others of that size, but they still aren't the whole picture, albeit an increasingly large part.
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