It appears that Congress will shortly be sending the President a farm bill (H.R. 2419) that he will be completely justified in vetoing.

There is no significant reform in H.R. 2419. For example, rather than accept a modest proposal from the Bush Administration to eliminate subsidy payments to those farmers with an adjusted gross income in excess of $200,000 and provide a payment limit of $250,000 per year, the administration indicated it was willing to accept $500,000 as the income cutoff. However, H.R. 2419 will only begin to eliminate subsidies when income reaches $950,000. At that level, there is a 10 percent reduction in subsidies for every $100,000 in additional income, so farmers can make $1.95 million before the subsidies would be totally eliminated.

Under current law, $5.2 billion annually in direct payments go to individuals (many of whom are no longer farming) without any regard to prices or income. These payments are a continuation of transition payments originally created in the 1996 farm bill, which were intended to be phased out by 2002. Sixty percent of these payments go to the wealthiest 10 percent of recipients. Conferees claim that they are providing reform by reducing these payments by a total of $400 million  less than 1 percent of the $26 billion in direct payments that are scheduled to go out over the next five years. To add insult to injury, H.R. 2419 creates a new $3.8 billion disaster program that will be primarily directed to the same producers that are now receiving the bulk of the direct payments.

With record high farm income and world food prices rising rapidly, it is not the time to approve a $300 billion farm bill that will perpetuate programs that benefit wealthy farmers, enable them to expand their operations and gobble up more farmland, and turn the small towns of rural America into ghost towns. The farm bill’s subsidies hurt poor people in America and poor farmers in developing nations, all at an exceedingly high cost to U.S. taxpayers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Politics .