Thanks to the application of a little last-minute budgetary magic, the farm bill before the Senate this week authorizes about $10 billion in new subsidies, price guarantees and disaster aid in the next decade, even as farmers report near-record profits.
There is a new $5.1 billion “disaster trust fund,” as well as a revenue insurance program that would increase taxpayer costs by $4.7 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Spread through the huge bill are gains for producers of wheat, milk, sugar, peanuts, barley, oats and honey, and a new $1 million-a-year subsidy earmarked for camelina, a seed used to make biofuels.
A disaster trust fund? What the heck is that for? Farmers have a trust fund now? From who? Me and you, that’s who. And they get a revenue insurance program. A program that makes sure the farmers make money. Is this not outrageous to you? Why are we doing this? It makes no sense at all.
Let’s ask the two questions we ask here when we find something like this:
- Where is this authorized in the Constitution?
- Would the Founding Fathers approve of this program?
Answers:
- It isn’t.
- Not only no, but James Madison might try to whoop someone’s butt over it.
At least one guy in Washington gets it:
To Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), a longtime critic of the program, this year’s bill marks a “continuum” with the past rather than a change in direction.
“The farm program is agriculture’s answer to 1930s socialism,” he joked last week. “It’s commissar policy.”
It is time to end these subsidies. Just end them. We are $9,000,000,000,000 in debt, and you think you can insure a farmer’s revenue. The Chinese insure revenue too, and they would be insuring American farmers, because we sure don’t have the money to do it. Where do they think this money coming from?
