Where the Trough Is Overflowing

[elleng]

Every five years or so, Congress promises a new, improved farm bill that will end unnecessary subsidies to big farmers, enhance the environment and actually do something to help small farmers and small towns. But what it usually does is find ways of disguising the old inequities, sending taxpayers dollars to wealthy farmers, accelerating the expansion of industrial farming, inflating land prices and further depopulating rural America.

The new five-year farm bill that could hit the Senate floor as early as this week promises more of the same — excessively generous handouts, combined with a serious erosion of environmental protections. The nearly trillion-dollar bill would provide over 10 years roughly $140 billion in farm subsidies, $55 billion or so in conservation programs and more than $750 billion in food stamp aid.

The subsidies have always been controversial. A mix of direct payments, price supports, loans, subsidized insurance and disaster relief, these subsidies provided protection for millions of farmers in the New Deal and afterward against the vicissitudes of the weather and the market. But in recent years, they have mainly lined the pockets of big farmers of big row crops who don’t need help, while ignoring the little guys who do.

As numerous studies from the Environmental Working Group have shown, the story of modern agriculture in this country is a story of concentration, of huge subsidies flowing to relatively few farmers who grow a handful of row crops — corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton and rice — in a dozen or so Midwestern and Southern states.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/where-the-trough-is-overflowing.html

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Damn. This system just isn't working.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. It sure isn't working.

Those wealthy farmers must be lobbying intensely for such a windfall.

Damn.

[fasttense]

2. Farm subsidies are a joke

"Because farm subsidies, old and new, have been tied to production, those cultivating the largest acreage get the biggest payouts. The top 20 percent of recipients from 1995 to 2010 got 90 percent of the subsidies; the bottom 80 percent just 10 percent. Many farmers — well over half the total, by some estimates — get no help at all."

We are a small farm about 14 acres and guess what we got in subsidies? $0.00

We have to have over 50 head of sheep to be even eligible to get 50% help to put up fences. But a friend who has over 300 acres and thousands of sheep got his barn built and fencing put up with a 90% subsidy.

It's nice to be rich and get the federal government to give you welfare.

[dotymed]

3. I don"t know if they keep records

that tell how many of the recipients of farm subsides are politicians. I think so many people would be amazed that many politicians directly benefit from these subsides. I know that when I lived in Indiana I was amazed how many state politicians, from both sides of the aisle, received farm subsidies. I was involved in Union organizing and I got to know some of them and support some of them.
So many of them were afforded a good living because they knew how to manipulate and profit handsomely from the system.
Very few (one off hand) did any type of "hands on" farm work,yet a major source of their income was the government subsidies.
Jimmy Carter (IMO, a very decent man) was a peanut farmer. Peanut farming is one the (if not the) highest paid and protected crops.
The rich get richer on purpose...

[Odin2005]

4. And much of these subsidies ends up as cheap HFCS.