REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Farm State Pig-Out
Members of both parties spread the manure around.
That great rooting, snooting noise you hear in the distance, dear taxpayers, is the sound of election-year, farm-state politics rolling out of the U.S. Congress. We all know democracy isn't cheap, but this is ridiculous.
This week the Senate is expected to approve the final farm bill, a 10-year, $173.5 billion bucket of slop that has even Washington agog. (It passed the House Thursday.) By the time all the handouts and payoffs were complete, the well-fed conferees had agreed to increase agricultural spending by no less than 70%. This alone amounts to one of the greatest urban-to-rural wealth transfers in history, a sort of Farm Belt Great Society.
But there's so much more. The U.S. Senate has also turned the energy bill into a farm-state pig-out, adding a new ethanol mandate that would triple the use of that corn-based fuel by 2012. No fewer than 67 Senators went along with what everyone agrees will add about $8.5 billion annually to gas prices in the first five years alone. This of course is a wealth transfer not so much to farmers as to Archer-Daniels-Midland, the corporate ward of the farm-welfare state that already soaks up billions in taxpayer subsidies.
We wish there were some heroes in this fête du cochon. But with Senate control likely to be decided in tight Midwest races this November, everyone--Democrats, Republicans, even the White House--has died and gone to pig heaven. And they've repudiated their principles to do it.
Republicans have put a stake through their own 1996 Freedom to Farm Act, which they advertised as historic legislation that was gradually supposed to wean farmers off subsidies. This bill is "historic," too, but only in the sense that it returns U.S. farm policy to the Dust Bowl dependency cycle of price supports and overproduction.
Subsidy rates for some commodity crops will jump by 10% this year alone. And that doesn't count the special handouts. The GOP even let Democratic Leader Tom Daschle reward Vermont turncoat Jim Jeffords for last year's majority-making Senate defection with a $1.3 billion dairy subsidy. House-Senate conferees ladled out $94 million for an apple program, $500 million for a sugar high and $4 billion in peanut spread. They created new programs for dry peas and lentils, and even resurrected dead programs for wool, mohair and honey.
As for Democrats, they abandoned any pretense of support for "working families" in cities and suburbs. This bill taxes them to line the pockets of huge agribusinesses. Of $71 billion handed out to farmers over the past five years, two-thirds went to just 10% of the farms. The bulk of this bill's new flood of subsidies will go to a select group of wealthy wheat, rice, corn, cotton and soybean growers in states like South Dakota, Iowa and Missouri.
The one positive measure in the Senate bill--a cap of $275,000 on the amount of subsidies per farm per year--was killed in conference. The cap goes up to $360,000, and farmers were handed tools to circumvent even that limit.
Where, we wonder, is the adult supervision? President Bush is supposed to defend the taxpayer interest amid such Congressional revels, but instead he's joined the fun. Last fall the Administration voiced some disapproval of the House bill. But last week the President surfaced in South Dakota to extol the new ethanol tax as "good for our economy" and "good for our national security."
All of this had better help the GOP win the Senate back this fall, because if it doesn't Mr. Bush will have paid a high price. The spending here makes a joke of his wartime rhetoric about choosing between guns and butter. And then there is the damage these farm subsidies will do to his trade agenda.
Only last year, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick convinced Europeans to put their bloated farm subsidies on the table in upcoming global trade talks. But this farm bill moves America closer to French-style farm subsidies. European Union Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy recently noted that the U.S. now pays three times more per farm than does the EU. U.S. farms are larger, but the point is still striking. It's no surprise that the EU, Canada, Brazil and Australia have all blasted the farm bill, with the last of these threatening to take its case to the World Trade Organization.
"We did it with steel, we did it with lumber, and now we're turning to our allies and saying we're doing it again with farm," laments Representative John Boehner (R., Ohio), along with California Democrat Cal Dooley, a rare dissenter from the spending consensus.
We don't expect it'll do much good. But someone has to inform taxpayers that their pockets are being picked for what is in essence a farm state welfare bill. Whatever happened to Midwestern, rural self-reliance?
