House Republicans Pass Bloated Socialist Monstrosity

[cali]

The House of Representatives just passed a farm bill, which overlays a Byzantine political calculus atop what ought to be a simple policy question. Should the government subsidize business owners because their business is agriculture? The answer — even to somebody relatively friendly to government, like me — is obviously not. Running a farm is not inherently more virtuous or necessary than running a gas station or a bookstore. Farmers earn more than the average American. Washington should get out of the business of paying farmers directly (or indirectly, through price supports that drive up food costs) altogether.

The political complication that comes into play is that farm subsidies have traditionally been packaged together with food stamps. Food stamps strike me as an especially meritorious program. Giving people money because they’re so poor they struggle to eat regularly makes way, way, way more sense than giving people money because they’re in a particular (and generally lucrative) line of work. You could replace food stamps with some other kind of cash grant, but the main idea of helping people because they're poor is sound.

Historically, the two programs have passed together. There’s some policy rationale for this. Some of the farm subsidies drive up the price of food, making it harder for poor people to buy the food and thus making it more necessary to subsidize them. But the main rationale for joining food stamps is political. It gets urban liberals to vote for farm subsidies that hurt their constituents, and it gets rural conservatives to tolerate food stamps that they’d otherwise oppose. And since advocates of both farm subsidies and food stamps fear losing their program more than anything else, they strongly endorse keeping them together.

The coalition between the two has come undone in recent weeks. Why? Because under President Obama, conservatives have gone from not caring much about food stamps to detesting food stamps as the emblem of Obama’s Chicago-style urban socialist welfare dependency administration. Food stamp spending has increased, not because Obama is handing them out like candy but because the number of poor, hungry people has dramatically increased since the Great Recession.

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/republicans-pass-bloated-socialist-monstrosity.html

[newblewtoo]

1. This article makes a good point

about farm subsidies. The family farm has largely been replaced by agri-businesses. Thanks for posting this as it provides plenty of 'food for thought'. Feeding hungry people is a noble ambition, feeding hungry corporations not so much.

K&R

[railsback]

2. Farm subsidies were meant for the small family farms

Somehow it got contorted into funding mega corporate farms. Just like small business loans aren't actually small business loans when the cut-off is 500 employees. There's nothing left for the actual small businesses.

It would seem the GOP are trying a back door approach to gutting Food Stamps, by funding through the appropriations process, where they can gut it. The Senate will just stuff SNAP back where it belongs when they send it back to the House, so Boehner, again, is going to have to rely on Democrats again to get anything of significance passed.

[Laelth]

3. Agriculture truly is a national security issue.

The one sure way to get a revolution is to have a national food shortage.

So, to combat this very real threat, we subsidize agriculture (so that we keep enough arable land in production to cover the entire country's food needs in the event that we can no longer import any food), plus we give food to the poor (through SNAP) in order to prevent the poor from revolting. The two programs go hand-in-hand.

Severing them is reckless, to the highest degree. Playing politics with either one is quite reckless, and in the recent past was unthinkable.

I am a liberal, and I maintain a healthy suspicion of agri-business, but I do understand the very sane policy reasons that we subsidize them.

-Laelth