John Stossel uses his column this week to savage farm subsidies. The General Accounting Office uncovered about $1.1 billion in payments to dead farmers from 1999 to 2005. But dead farmers were the least of the problem. Agriculture subsidies cost American taxpayers $25 billion every year.
Exactly. The agricultural section of the U.S. code is nearly 1,800 pages.
There's an easy way to avoid such absurdities: Abolish all farm subsidies.
Why are taxpayers forced to pay farmers $25 billion a year? Sure, farmers face droughts and floods, but that's been true since Moses' day. They can't say they weren't put on notice that farming has risks. Running a restaurant or a software company entails risks, too, but we don't guarantee their continued operation. Those businesses and America are stronger for it.
Farm subsidies are popular with politicians because Big Agriculture lobbies hard, and many people believe that without subsidies, we wouldn't have a reliable food supply.
But what an insane myth that is. As I wrote in "Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity", most crops are not subsidized. Yet we have no shortages of fruits, vegetables, livestock and poultry. America has plenty of peaches, plums, peas, green beans, etc., and farmers who grow those crops do fine. What makes wheat, cotton, corn, soybeans and rice different?
Last week, the New York Times reported that dairy farmers in New Zealand get along perfectly well without subsidies: "[E]ver since a liberal but free-market government swept to power in 1984 and essentially canceled handouts to farmers — something that just about every other government in an advanced industrial nation has considered both politically and economically impossible. … [O]utput has soared."
Stossel forgot sugar – one of the most egregious of the farm subsidies that artificially keep sugar prices very high in the US. The insanity of the system is that while some farmers are getting subsidies to grow certain products, others are being paid to not grow the same things. The term "farmer" used to mean a small, family run operation. These days "farmer" basically means agricultural baron with huge Federal subsidies. Family farms are really a thing of the past but the subsidies that were originally intended to help out those small operators are now being consumed by corporate operations. If lawmakers want to continue the fiction of the family farm, it would be easily enough to fix: put an income limit on subsidies.
Congress rejected just that, though.
An amendment that would have withheld subsidies from farmers with incomes of $250,000 or more was rejected by the House.
Very nice.
$25 billion… geez, I wonder how many of our porkers would be feeding at that trough if we abolished the farm subsidies. Don’t even think about getting a tax break or anything else. Once they’ve got your money. IT’S THEIRS!!! Let’s not cloud the issue with any rational thought or clear thinking.
One wonders how many Congresscritters have incomes of more than $250,000 per year from heavily subsidized farms.