“Preserving Welfare For The Rich”: Farm Subsidies Reveal Congressional Double Standard
Congress has left me confused. Stunned, actually, as well as bewildered, chagrined and slightly depressed. The GOP-dominated House has passed a bill that defies compassion, mathematics and common sense.
OK, so there’s nothing unusual about that. Point taken.
But the recent passage of a farm bill, after months of delay, is an especially sharp example of congressional priorities — protect the rich and punish the poor, comfort the comfortable while brutalizing the afflicted. The bill will cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), usually known as food stamps, while preserving subsidies for farmers, most of whom could get by quite nicely without help.
By contrast, many Americans are struggling with a globalized, roboticized economy that has devalued the average worker. The new economy has forced down wages, eliminated job security and abandoned traditional perks such as pensions. It is quite possible to work 40 or 50 hours a week and still need help to put food on the table, as the managers of food pantries around the country will attest.
Yet, congressional observers are predicting that the farm bill will pass the Senate and get President Obama’s signature. While most Democrats don’t like the cuts, the current bill, they figure, is the best they can do. It takes about 1 percent from SNAP — around $800 million a year in the $80 billion-a-year program — but that’s less than conservatives had initially sought.
Still, if Republicans really care about deficits, if they really want to rein in government, if they believe people ought to stand on their own two feet and refuse the “welfare state,” why are they preserving welfare for those who need it least? Do they not see the glaring hypocrisy in their insistence on farm subsidies?
The bill does end the least politically defensible part of farm welfare: direct payments, paid to farmers whether they plant or not. But it continues a host of other unnecessary programs that cost billions — including crop subsidies and crop insurance. Indeed, the bill increases some crop subsidies, such as those to Southern peanut farmers. And the remaining programs are just as bad as the direct payments.
Take crop insurance, which has its roots in the Dust Bowl era. Though conditions have changed substantially since then — the small family farmer has virtually disappeared — crop insurance has mushroomed. In 2012, according to The Insurance Journal, taxpayers spent $14 billion insuring farmers against a loss of income. Is there any other business in America that gets that sort of benefit? Aren’t farmers supposed to be entrepreneurs willing to take risks?
This farm welfare comes at a time when agricultural income is soaring. Last year, farm income was expected to top $120 billion, its highest mark, adjusted for inflation, since 1973, the Insurance Journal said. Lots of millionaires and billionaires are on the list of those receiving the assistance.
One case of mind-boggling hypocrisy is that of U.S. Rep. Stephen Fincher, a Republican and a farmer from Frog Jump, TN, who collected nearly $3.5 million in subsidies from 1999 to 2012, according to the Environmental Working Group. In 2012, he received $70,000 in direct payments alone — again, money paid to farmers whether they plant or not. (Can anyone say “moochers” and “takers”?)
Fincher, however, supports draconian cuts to food stamps. During a congressional debate over the SNAP program, he said, without apparent irony: “We have to remember there is not a big printing press in Washington that continually prints money over and over. This is other people’s money that Washington is appropriating and spending.”
I don’t know why the cognitive dissonance doesn’t make his brain explode.
Fraud, by the way, is rampant in farm subsidies, although you’re unlikely to hear anything about it. While the occasional welfare cheat or food stamp grifter is held up as an example of widespread abuse, neither politicians nor reporters talk much about the fraud involved in agricultural programs. You have to burrow into reports from the Government Accountability Office for that. They point to millions stolen by farm cheats.
It’s enough to make you wonder what the food stamp critics are really upset about. Government spending? Or giving the working poor a little more to eat?
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, February 2, 2014
“So Much For Reform”: The Only Winners In The Farm Bill Are Farmers And Big Insurance
Late Monday, House and Senate negotiators finalized a bipartisan compromise on the five-year farm bill, a warm-and-fuzzy-sounding Frankenstein-like amalgamation of crop subsidies, food stamps, and various handouts to industries loosely related to agriculture. The 949-page House-Senate compromise, two years in the making, will likely go up for a House vote on Wednesday and a Senate vote next week.
“We’ve got a bill that makes sense, works for farmers and ranchers and consumers and families that need help, and protects our land and water and our wildlife,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, tells Reuters.
Stabenow may be correct that the farm bill will make it to President Obama’s desk — “it’s expected to sail through the House and Senate in the coming days — mostly because lawmakers want to get it over with already,” says The Washington Post‘s Ed O’Keefe. But it’s not exactly great for farmers and families that need help or other consumers.
The bill cuts spending by about $23 billion versus current funding levels, with more than $8 billion of that coming from cuts to food stamps, formally called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It amounts to roughly a $90-a-month cut to 850,000 households. That’s far less than the $40 billion in SNAP cuts in the House version, but roughly twice the reduction in the Senate bill.
Another $6 billion comes from combining 23 conservation programs into 13. Other programs being cut include the “Red Meat Safety Research Center.” But the biggest supposed saving — $19 billion — is from ending direct payments to farmers (and some landowners who don’t actually farm), which cost taxpayers about $5 billion a year.
So that sounds like shared sacrifice, right? Not exactly. Most of the money from the direct payments is being shifted to subsidized crop insurance programs. “It’s a classic bait-and-switch proposal to protect farm subsidies,” Vincent H. Smith, a professor of farm economics at Montana State University, tells The New York Times. “They’ve eliminated the politically toxic direct payments program and added the money to a program that will provide farmers with even larger subsidies.”
On the other hand, the farm lobby is lining up behind the package. “The bill is a compromise,” says Ray Gaesser, president of the American Soybean Association. “It ensures the continued success of American agriculture, and we encourage both the House and the Senate to pass it quickly.” The American Farm Bureau Association — the big muscle of the farm lobby, employing 52 Washington lobbyists — urged quick passage of the bill.
The House and Senate conferees also loosened limits on how much individual farmers can receive in subsidies and loans in a given year, to $125,000 per person from $50,000 in the earlier bills. “If what we’ve heard proves true, the deal will result in virtually unlimited farm program payments continuing to inure to the nation’s largest and wealthiest mega-farms,” says Traci Bruckner at Nebraska’s Center for Rural Affairs.
For an in-depth look a the politics of the farm bill, read Molly Ball’s excellent article at The Atlantic. Her thesis is that the big losers here are Republicans, since rural Red State GOP stalwarts are feeling betrayed by the intra-party fighting over the bill between the “more urban, libertarian, ideological strain” of the party represented by the Tea Party and the traditional faction that represents rural and farming interests. But it’s also pretty clear who the winners are: Farmers and insurance companies.
When America’s programs of crop subsidies began during the Great Depression, more than 20 percent of employed workers made their living on farms, earning a third of what Americans pulled in for non-farm work, Ball notes. Now, farmers make up only two percent of the U.S. workforce, and farming households earned $84,400 on average in 2010, 25 percent higher than the national average.
“Farm subsidies are welfare for the well-to-do,” argued the Cato Institute’s Tad DeHaven and Chris Edwards at The Hill. Farmers booked record profits in 2012, despite severe droughts, thanks largely to federally supported crop insurance. According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), taxpayers pick up 62 percent of the average farmer’s crop insurance premiums. And the feds pay insurers directly, too, to the tune of $1.3 billion a year.
“In 2012, the Corn Belt’s unprecedented drought led to an insurance payout of $18 billion in crop indemnities — $14 billion of it taxpayer-funded,” Ball adds. “The insurance companies, in what should have been a terrible year for them, made a profit.” This has created a strange coalition that includes Cato and the conservative Heritage Foundation plus liberal groups like the EGW. They disagree on food stamps, she says, but “left and right alike charge that programs billed as a safety net to protect farmers from the vicissitudes of nature are instead an increasingly cushy hammock.”
The outlook is mixed for consumers. Efforts to stabilize or boost prices for farmers isn’t great for shoppers in the short run — a program to limit sugar imports and domestic production is designed to keep sugar prices artificially high. But new rules will force meat packagers to say where the animal was raised and slaughtered, a boon to label-watchers.
And in the long run, as Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told the Farm Bureau’s annual meeting last week, the one percent of Americans who grow the nation’s food supply “ought to be celebrated.” Their toil lets the rest of the country pursue other work, he said. “The country ought to be reminded of it, and every farmer in this country should be valued, appreciated, and thanked.”
I like farmers and am glad when rural America gets the tools it needs to survive. But the Farm Bureau and other members of the farm lobby appears to have gotten their money’s worth in this Congress. On the other hand, it’s called the farm bill — so it’s not exactly a breach of truth in advertising.
By: Peter Weber, The Week, January 28, 2014
“Surrendering To Moneyed Interests”: Who Snuck In The Monsanto Protection Act?
Anger at the so-called Monsanto Protection Act — a biotech rider that protects genetically modified seeds from litigation in the face of health risks — has been directed at numerous parties in Congress and the White House for allowing the provision to be voted and signed into law. But the party responsible for anonymously introducing the rider into the broad, unrelated spending bill had not been identified until now.
As Mother Jones’ Tom Philpott notes, the senator responsible is Missouri Republican Roy Blunt — famed friend of Big Agrigulture on Capitol Hill. Blunt even told Politico’s David Rogers that he “worked with” Monsanto to craft the rider (rendering the moniker “Monsanto Protection Act” all the more appropriate). Philpott notes:
The admission shines a light on Blunt’s ties to Monsanto, whose office is located in the senator’s home state. According to OpenSecrets, Monsanto first started contributing to Blunt back in 2008, when it handed him $10,000. At that point, Blunt was serving in the House of Representatives. In 2010, when Blunt successfully ran for the Senate, Monsanto upped its contribution to $44,250. And in 2012, the GMO seed/pesticide giant enriched Blunt’s campaign war chest by $64,250.
… The senator’s blunt, so to speak, admission that he stuck a rider into an unrelated bill at the behest of a major campaign donor is consistent with the tenor of his political career. While serving as House whip under the famously lobbyist-friendly former House Majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) during the Bush II administration, Blunt built a formidable political machine by transforming lobbying cash into industry-accomodating legislation. In a blistering 2006 report, Public Citizen declared Blunt “a legislative leader who not only has surrendered his office to the imperative of moneyed interests, but who has also done so with disturbing zeal and efficiency.”
By: Natasha Lennard, Salon, April 5, 2013
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