Posted on 07/07/2013 4:46:39 AM PDT by onyx
Don’t you worry about a thing.
Boner will do the wrong thing.
AGAIN.
Doesn’t he always?
What are the chances?
If principled people could win elections, they would study the situation and do what they thought was best for us. We’ve got Boehner.
Would prefer instead of cuts to see the bill doubled or quadrupled, and thus guarantee it going down in flames.
What is good for the NATION means nothing.
What is good for the POLITICIAN’s career is paramount.
Another large complicated bill in the hundreds of billion dollars range to buy votes for reelection by spending money that we do not have.
If each of these items are needed then they need to be separate bills. Instead the pols get to hide what they vote for from their constituents.
$939 billion.
If you ever needed to know where this country went off the rails...
The bill failed on the House floor last month in a 195 to 234 vote, spurring conservative calls for Boehner to split the legislation into farm spending and food stamps before it is brought back to the floor. Behind the scenes, the fight over the bill is pitting House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) against Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.). While Cantor wants to divide the bill and cut more spending, Lucas wants to keep it intact with only modest changes.Obviously there are plenty of FINOs who would prefer a flat-out dictatorship, instead of the wheelin' dealin' representative form of government we have.
My take is that the bill is laden with layer on layer of historical compromise. Each layer of each layer is precedent for the under layers.
There is no “good for the nation”. The layer on layer on layer is this group against that group disfavoring a third group that presents unrelated desires into the negotiating chaos. The bill is in effect the nation against it’s self.
The complexity stems from each of the 457 districts having constituents with a compromised layer or partial layer.
The question then becomes do we throw it out and destroy the precedent and thus the negotiated compromise or start from scratch? If major portions are determined to do over from scratch, then it all is up for grabs and renegotiation and new compromise on a massive bipartisan scale.
The result could mean that nothing else gets done by the Congress while this monster gets all sorted out and redone.
It is easy to be critical but the Speaker has a very difficult task ahead charting the path forward.
...in Congress, including the Senate, I agree 100%
The result could mean that nothing else gets done by the Congress while this monster gets all sorted out and redone.
Works for me.
Bills that essentially give taxpayer $$ to people to do nothing, artificially raise/depress prices, pay favors to ‘big farms’ (T. Turner, B. Springsteen, etc.)
Got an idea, since I don’t see WHERE Congress has the authority anyway, DON’T pass the damn bill. People start to charge and pay for the true cost of products. Let the market decide.
Two chances. Slim and fat.
The numbers, $800 billion in giveaways in a $939 billion misnamed “farm bill.” It’s clear that the bundling was intended to disguise the redistributionist purpose of the $800 billion. Split it up.
The only way for the House to generate any “savings” would be to not consider this bill or any replacement bill. Let the programs die.
That would be a first in this country.
Dozens of Republicans joined the Democrats to reject the bill in the vote a few weeks ago.
The Dems wanted more spending but the 62 Republicans said the bill was too fat.
A lot of conservative leaning “Tea Party” NO’s but one of them I noticed who voted YES was Steve King of Iowa.
Agricultural interests apparently have more say than any conservative convictions.
One NO vote came from freshman Congressman Keith Rothfus from western Pennsylvania. I supported him financially in 2010 and 2012.
It looks I made a good investment with that kind of vote.
Monsanto needs their welfare check to make more GMO crap. Big Ag can’t live without the billions they get each yr from taxpayers
The very best outcome would be to split the bill, then convert the food stamps part to a block grant to the states, with *incentives* for them to support their own agriculture by augmenting the food stamps with farm surpluses.
To explain this, America almost always has too much food, which is very stressful to our agriculture, because surplus can hurt farmers much worse than shortage. Using food stamps to primarily bleed off surplus won’t work, because people need a balanced diet. But they *can* be used to bleed of *some* of the surplus.
Say a state has a bumper crop of potatoes. Along with their food stamps, the state is given an incentive to buy up some of the surplus potato crop, to stabilize the price for farmers, then to give away the surplus as a bonus to the food stamp recipients. Hopefully with a piece of paper that tells them what they can do with potatoes.
Likewise, states can be encouraged to swap surplus products, say a surplus of potatoes in Idaho with a surplus of cheese in Wisconsin. Again, both surpluses going to their food stamp recipients, but helping both their potato farmers and cheese makers.
Ironically, a state surplus market would, by stabilizing markets, save many billions of dollars at the federal level in the other half of the agriculture bill. This is because much of the money in that bill is to stabilize markets; so if they are stable, it is unspent.
532 groups want this monster? There’s no way that many groups are dirt farmers. Assuming we need a non-constitutional farm bill at all the rest of that krap needs to stand on its own someplace else. Way past time for the adults to take a hard look at this money hole.
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