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Contact Jim: jdipeso@rep.org (253) 740-2066 / 2008 Archive / 2007 Archive / 2006 Archive / 2005 Archive
Letting the Mediocre Be the Enemy of the Good
May 21, 2008
Congress put lipstick and earrings on the hog known as the farm bill and pronounced it a beauty queen.
Both the remaining Democratic candidates for president said they were convinced by the makeover.
Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, said he was not.
The ugliness of the $300 billion farm bill that President Bush has vetoed, in the face of a likely override fueled by bipartisan politics-as-usual, is not so much in what it includes, but in what might have been.
Last year, the politics of reforming the costly, confusing swamp of outdated federal farm programs seemed to be getting up a head of steam. A formidable coalition was gathering – deficit hawks upset about costs, free traders upset about market distortions, conservationists seeking more funding for environmental and clean energy programs, advocates for the poor concerned about the harmful effects of U.S. subsidies on developing nation farmers.
Unfortunately, the reform movement collided with the gravy train of commodity crop subsidies and was driven off the rails.
The congressional engineers manning the gravy train’s locomotive argue that food and nutrition assistance accounts for two-thirds of the bill’s cost, while the crop subsidies that draw widespread scorn make up 14 percent, or “only” $43 billion. And yes, the bill includes an extra $4 billion for conservation.
But that misses an important point. At a time when farm income is up significantly, Congress had a golden opportunity for root-and-branch reform that would have cut costs, simplified farm aid, spread it more equitably, freed up additional funds for conservation, and kept us out of trouble with our trading partners. Instead of taking that opportunity, however, Congress allowed the mediocre to be the enemy of the good.
A few examples: The bill imposes income caps for subsidies, but they’re laughably modest and manifestly fail to cut off the flow of USDA checks to the well-to-do.
And the cap applies to only one subsidy, Direct Payments, perhaps the most egregious of all the subsidies, which in any event was barely tinkered with. So, acreage-based Direct Payment checks will continue going to farmland owners, regardless of what they grow, how much they sell it for, or whether they grow anything at all.
Target prices and crop loan rates were raised, which will lock in higher costs in the future when crop prices fall, as they inevitably will. The sugar price-fixing program, which comes straight out of socialism central casting, was left intact.
And the bill piles a new subsidy atop the old. It creates a $4 billion fund that, in essence, will reward farmers for plowing up marginal drylands that store carbon and provide wildlife habitat. The pot is called the “permanent disaster” fund.
A permanent disaster, indeed.
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