Can someone give me ringing defense of the farm bill recently passed by the House of Representatives? The bill seems to fail on economic, fiscal, political, and every other basis I can think of. I’m at a loss to explain it.
For decades bipartisan support of our agricultural policy, such as it has been, has been accomplished by yoking farm subsidies to food stamps or, as the program is now known, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). That both of these components might be bad policies made no difference.
Did you ever see TCM’s promo for its series of Oscar-winning movies, depicting a nursing home dramatization of Rocky? Here it is:
The farm bills as they’ve traditionally been constructed remind me of nothing so much as a retirement home version of The Defiant Ones. Even though the protagonists are just barely shambling along, as long as they cooperate, they survive.
While it was reasonable enough for House Republicans to want to break up a massive bill into its component parts so that the good and effective components could be continued while the bad or ineffective parts removed, enacting a bill that preserves farm subsidies for corporate farms while defunding SNAP just looks mean-spirited.
I think that farm subsidies as such are ill-conceived. I’m sure it would be possible to come up with a better approach to the problems that SNAP is trying to address just as I’m sure that genuine fiscal hawks (if any still remain) were concerned about the program’s soaring costs. The original problems still remain; defunding the program won’t solve them. Not every SNAP beneficiary is a malingerer.
The bill that was passed certainly looks indefensible.
Franz Matzner has a different set of complaints about it:
To start with, the bill takes aim at the environment by first crippling, and then outright ending, conservation programs, as well as zeroing out mandatory funding for rural renewable energy and efficiency development. Thousands of farmers from every state have participated in these programs, generating income while helping restore wetlands and prairies, reducing fertilizer and pesticide pollution that poison our rivers and drinking water, and decreasing the nation’s reliance on polluting fossil fuels.
In stark contrast, the bill would make permanent billions of dollars in subsidies for corporate farmers. This would upend decades of precedent and lock taxpayers into these high costs, at least creating a deterrent to regular updating and improving of our farm policies, and at worst threatening the continuation of important policies to protect soil, water, wildlife, and public health. This is a curious decision by a party clamoring for deficit cuts and reform.
This targeting of conservation programs is a doubly harmful move considering they provide the very tools farmers need most to help combat the ravages of extreme weather driven by climate change.
In gutting these popular, successful programs, the GOP was just getting warmed up. The House bill also takes aim at our bedrock environmental laws by shielding pesticide manufactures from oversight, overturning rules against spraying pesticides directly into lakes and streams, and more.
Finally, the bill includes a stunning provision that would bar states from enacting their own food and farm laws. This hidden attack on state rights could invalidate more than 150 state laws, threatening health, animal welfare, and food safety.
Update
Even the Wall Street Journal can’t bring itself to defend the bill more than half-heartedly:
The new farm bill still has more subsidies than is desirable, especially amid a booming agriculture economy and record land prices. The supports for prospering sugar and dairy farmers are especially dreary. Republicans defeated a proposal by Budget Chairman Paul Ryan to put income limits for receiving subsidies, so “farmers” with non-farm incomes of nearly $1 million a year can still dun taxpayers.
But at least the bill spends $20 billion less over 10 years than current law. One major reform is the repeal of a 1949 law that reinstates New Deal-era production controls and price supports if Congress failed to pass a new bill. That was also a gambit to scare Congress into acting. In conference with the Senate, Republicans can improve the bill further by insisting on reducing the income limits for farm subsidies to $500,000 or less.
The article goes on to suggest that the House Republicans can go on to pass a reformed SNAP bill. IMO they should have passed a reformed SNAP bill first, for atmospherics if for nothing else.
I’ll also add that the single thing that we could do that would most aid struggling African farmers is curtailing cotton subsidies. That’s not even being contemplated. And subsidizing domestic sugar producers is unconscionable on fiscal, economic, political, and environmental grounds. It’s a relic of the Cold War.
The appearance is certainly hideous. The Republicans seem to eagerly desire the image of hateful meanie and corporate lackey; who is it they think this will appeal to? Notice Democrats didn’t oppose cuts to nutritional programs keeping children in some semblance of health, they just wanted smaller reductions.
We have a government that is literally reducing nutrition necessary to immunilogical and intellectual development because of numbers on a spreadsheet.
It’s interesting that Republicans also campaign as opponents of centralization and champions of state sovereignty, unless states want to enact laws which inconvenience large corporations. Suddenly Republicans go all in on central planning and federal supremacy, as they did in this bill by taking control of food and agriculture.
Democrats are a slow poison that gradually weakens until the victim lapses into a coma. Republicans are a virulent toxin that causes one to quickly vomit up their entrails before their spines snap in a series of convulsions. The former hides its contempt, the latter cheerfully announces it.
SNAP’s budget last year was $81 billion dollars, serving 47 million people who earn a wage that can’t support them or their families. That’s a whopping $4.72 per day per person, but it’s a priority target for cuts??? We’re spending over a trillion dollars on a fighter jet that doesn’t work. We spent trillions more on invading a country that wasn’t a threat to us, and lost hundreds of billion to fraud by American contractors.
But as long as a handful of people rake in massive wealth from government welfare that’s acceptable. The real threat to liberty and fiscal sustainability is people who only bring in a few bucks thanks to nearly forty years of government policy intended to drive down their wages. A whole lot of people have the causation of dependency on government backwards, and they do so intentionally.
No argument here, Ben (as should be obvious from the title of my post).
The WSJ rightly notes the growth in the cost of the program over the years. They don’t seem to notice that even with the reforms they’ve suggested the program would still have grown, largely due to the economic downturn and lackluster recovery.
Dave,
I know you have a heart and a sense of perspective, two things sorely lacking these days.
The problems with subsidies and social programs are that, once enacted, they seem to become immune to non-partisan oversight or constructive updating.
Even with the economic downturn, food stamps has been a victim of growing fraud and abuse, as well as profit taking from the banking institutions dealing with the EBT cards.
Farm subsidies have long been questioned and criticized. But, for some reason, much like the debt problems in this country, there is no courage to address the inherent problems, in a straightforward manner, and make changes congruent with the reality of what makes fair and fiscal sense today.
I know of no study that has found significant levels of waste or abuse in the SNAP program. I know of several that have found very low levels of waste or abuse. Is there waste or abuse in the program? Sure. But probably not enough that rooting it out won’t cost more than just accepting it as the cost of the weak recovery.
I think the House Republicans are optimizing at the wrong level. You get most from optimization where there’s the most to optimize. The obvious candidates are the defense budget and Medicare.