Posted on 06/04/2012 4:06:45 PM PDT by chessplayer
While the economic malfeasance of agricultural subsidies may be relatively low on the totem pole of the federal government’s massively wasteful and intrusive spending binge, they are in and of themselves astoundingly terrible ideas that come with a whole host of neighborhood effects. From toying with market signals and inflating food prices; to inhibiting free trade that would benefit the poverty-stricken worldwide; to encouraging overproduction that degrades the environment: they’re just bad news. No American industry has been so persistently coddled as agriculture, helping out niche groups and special interests in the short term but making us all worse off in the long term.
"The Senate is expected to begin debate this week on a five-year farm and food aid bill that would save $9.3 billion by ending direct payments to farmers and replacing them with subsidized insurance programs for when the weather turns bad or prices go south."
"The details are still to be worked out. But there’s rare agreement that fixed annual subsidies of $5 billion a year for farmers are no longer feasible in this age of tight budgets and when farmers in general are enjoying record prosperity."
Ethanol is causing the Amazon rain forest to be chopped down to grow the soybeans that would otherwise be grown here.
Eco-wacko-ism and economic cronyism is causing actual ecological destruction.
According to the CATO Institute
“The largest portion of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s budget consists of food subsidies, not farm subsidies. Food subsidies will cost taxpayers $79 billion in fiscal 2009 and account for about two-thirds of USDA’s budget. The largest food subsidy programs are food stamps; the school breakfast and lunch programs; and the women, infants, and children (WIC) program. The federal government as a whole has about 26 food and nutrition programs operated by six different agencies”
>> Ag subsidies are as good a place as any to start the cutting.
Works for me. Welfare is welfare. Cut it all!
Cut all of that crap too. One hundred percent of it. Cut it!
It is obvious that most of the comments on this thread are from people with little or no knowledge of agribusiness and the way farm subsidies are actually paid and how each farmer must submit his AGI which then determines how much or how little of the subsidy is going to be paid.
In fact, in many cases, the only subsidy large farmers receive is for CRP land which is basically rent for land required to be taken out of production to provide habitat for various animals and birds.
Thank you Josh for posting about the food subsidies, not farm subsidies in the Ag budget.
Two-thirds of the budget is not about farmers, but about food stamps, free lunch, etc. And nothing is free; it’s your tax dollars.
So who does the Dept. of Agriculture benefit most?
Then you won’t miss it.
Cut it. Cut all of it. Cut it now. Get Government put of the business of farming entirely. Don’t even let them report statistics. The Dept. of Agriculture shouldn’t exist.
“Cut it. Cut all of it. Cut it now. Get Government put of the business of farming entirely. Don’t even let them report statistics. The Dept. of Agriculture shouldn’t exist.”
Cut the following departments immediately. All programs, all regulations, all employees:
Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, OSHA, EPA. The states can pick up the activities or not.
Thanks for the information, joshhiggins. US Border Patrol might also come out of that budget. That is one area we definitely need.
(rethinking Ag cuts...perhaps put CBP into Defense)
Oh, so subsidies are just fine if you agree with them?
I don’t know who is setting the prices but I paid $2.50 for a single bell pepper at Publix yesterday.
Almost every landholder within 1,000 miles of me is being paid to do nothing. “CRP” - it HAS to STOP!
The federal government sets the prices for food in ways so subtle it takes person with a PhD in Agricultural Economics to fathom. Many of these fellows work for the Federal Government.
Depression-era leftover, when technology drove down the prices so it wasn’t worth the farmer’s time.
Replace agriculture with the service industry, and you have the same governmental interference leading to prolonging, if not intensifying, market shock.
I go back even further..
I got into a fight with my high school soc. teacher on this subjuect and he became so nasty that my daddy, a farmer, went down to the school and had a talk with the guy.
The subsidies to agriculture were meant to keep prices low for consumers. Don’t believe it? Then you probably don’t know that food prices in the USA are the lowest in the world.
The amount of your food bill that goes to the actual product is less than 20%.. The rest is transportation trucking, warehousing, grocers etc,
The subsidies were approved because farmers had such narrow margins that food production was going down.
I don’t care why they were instituted. They were wrong then and they’re wrong now. Regulating the price of foodstuffs is NOT an enumerated power of the Federal government.
That practice needs to end and it needs to end now.
Many solid conservatives support farming subsidies. The supposed alternative is market-driven prices alone. I prefer a different approach to subsidies or pure market forces when it comes to the nation’s food supply. My opinion is that federal and state governments would be wise to buy and stockpile American agricultural and livestock products when they are plenty, and allow market forces to work when they are scarce.
Our food supply chain is incredibly short. Today, if we found our nation in a depression, the death toll would be catastrophic. Fewer people are capable of growing their own food. And the efficiency of the supply chain brings with it the weakness of running out quickly when supplies are depleted.
And the current subsidized insurance program has lots of flaws
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