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| 5/23 |
| 2008/5/16-23 [Politics/Domestic/Election, Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:49973 Activity:nil |
5/16 Congress passes huge pork bill.
http://tinyurl.com/4wwys7
http://tinyurl.com/44fywg
\_ Hello NATIONAL REVIEW crap!
\_ Is it wrong?
\_ No. NationalReview is right. Very RIGHT. Righteous.
Right wing. Right.
\_ Is this an interesting line of discussion to you?
Partisan line-drawing and team-based politics?
Left, right: it's all bullshit. Both left and right
wing politicians do stupid and corrupt things. The
rational individual will evaluate criticism impartially.
\_ The rational individual learns that some sources
are untrustworthy propaganda. While there may be
a story here, I'm not going to pay much attention
to the National Review's framing because I know they
are mendacious idealouges. (That being said I
am anti-farm subsidy, but there are plenty of sane
op eds out there declaiming the current bill.)
\_ Context seems to mean that you are saying
that there are lots of sane op-eds out there
supporting this bill. URL please? (if so)
\_ Untrustworthy propaganda? It's an op-ed. It is
not even a source. Find me a better op-ed then.
You talk as if you have no brain and can't
judge an argument on its own merits. Where's the
outcry from a mainstream source?
\_ If it's an op-ed, then label it as such. Posting
a bunch of shortened urls with a label that
appears to be about news is misleading. -10 pts.
\_ It is now. Any fact given in NRO immediately becomes untrue
by virtue of being printed there.
\_ Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. |
| 5/23 |
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| tinyurl.com/4wwys7 -> article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGY1ZDJjOGYzM2UzZTNkOWYxMGQ5YTAwYmY1ZDE0YTU= May 15, 2008 12:50 PM Pork Farm By the Editors The House (318-106) and Senate (81-15) have passed a new $300 billion farm bill by veto-proof margins this week. The bill is worse than the 2002 farm bill, which at the time was considered the most bloated and wasteful in history. President Bush should not only veto it, he should take his time in doing so. We have a feeling that the more time the public has to get to know this bill, the less they will like it. For starters, the bill extends the direct-payment program at a time when farm incomes have reached record highs. Direct payments are government payments intended to supplement farmers' incomes. Farmers receive these payments whether they grow anything or not. Ron Kind, a Democrat from Wisconsin, was absolutely right when he said of this provision, "It's not a safety net it's an entitlement program." Spurred by government-mandated ethanol consumption, net farm income is up 51 percent above its ten-year average, and farm families on average are making around $90,000 a year. In light of such prosperity, the Bush administration asked Congress to cap payments to farmers with adjusted gross incomes of over $200,000 a year. As the leading sponsors of the farm bill admit, this cap will exclude practically no one. The sponsors of this provision argue that this fund will prove less costly over time than allocating disaster-relief funds on an ad hoc basis once every few years, as Congress has done in the past. But this argument relies on the mistaken assumption that Congress needs to provide "disaster relief" for farmers at all. Disaster relief is nothing but a more politically palatable term for additional subsidies. If farmers can not survive bouts of bad weather by drawing upon the many government programs already available to them, including the federally funded crop-insurance program, they should find another line of work. With the new farm bill, Congress has accomplished the astonishing feat of making the federal sugar program even worse. Americans already pay close to twice the global average cost for sugar thanks to federal import quotas. The new bill adds a sugar buyback program, under which the federal government must purchase any "excess" sugar from domestic producers at 23 cents per pound and then immediately resell it to ethanol producers at 2 cents per pound, with the taxpayer stuck paying the 21-cent-per-pound difference. But perhaps the most egregious item in the new farm bill relates to international food aid. A longstanding provision governing US food aid to foreign countries requires that all the food America sends abroad to be purchased from American farmers. This means that, however much we allocate toward international food aid, a chunk of the money goes toward transporting food from the US to its final destination. In light of an increasing food-scarcity problem in less-developed countries, the Bush administration asked Congress to help cut down on transportation costs by allowing the food-aid program to purchase 25 percent of the food it distributes overseas from local farmers in destination countries. This would have allowed the US to provide more food for starving people for same amount of money. Even though $300 billion is a big burden on American taxpayers, it's apparently not big enough to change the political calculus of farm-subsidy supporters in Congress, as this week's votes indicate. At this rate, Americans will be saddled with costly and inefficient farm legislation for the foreseeable future, even though only a tiny percentage of Americans benefit from these programs. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, never has Congress taken so much from so many for the benefit of so few. |
| tinyurl.com/44fywg -> article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzU0MWI5ZjNhZmI4MTQyZjk0OTYwYzA0ZGFkOWQ2MWE= May 14, 2008 2:15 PM Crop the Crap An unacceptable farm bill. By Brian Riedl With food prices soaring, it takes some gall to force Americans to pay billions of dollars to millionaire agribusinesses. Since the last farm bill was enacted in 2002, the five crops that receive the lion's share of farm subsidies have also enjoyed massive price hikes: cotton (105 percent price hike), soybeans (164 percent), corn (169 percent), wheat (256 percent), and rice (281 percent). For consumers, these price hikes have caused financial pain domestically and near-riots abroad. For farmers, it's a sunnier story: Total net farm income has leaped 56 percent in just two years, and helped bring the average farm household's income to a record $89,434, and its net worth to $838,875. During this crop-price boom, continuing to subsidize farmers makes as much sense as paying Apple to make another generation of iPods. Yet instead of cutting, Congress's answer is to harvest even more farm subsidies. The latest version would increase payment rates for more than a dozen crops and increase conservation subsidies. Although the same farmers already receive massive annual subsidies, plus taxpayer-funded crop insurance, Congress would also layer a new permanent disaster aid program. Release of any disaster aid would require an emergency declaration, so expect Congress to declare an emergency any week that it rains or doesn't rain. Farm subsidies have long been America's largest corporate-welfare program. Rather than help small, struggling family farmers, the majority of subsidies go to commercial farmers, who report an average income of $200,000 and a net worth of nearly $2 million. President Bush called on Congress to end farm subsidies for families earning more than $200,000 annually. And for the vast majority of farmers and agribusiness that remain eligible for farm subsidies, bigger checks await. Agribusinesses have long exploited loopholes to evade the $150,000 annual limit on marketing loan subsidies (which are more subsidies than loans), including dividing themselves into dozens of separate legal entities and collecting subsidies for each one. Yet rather than better enforce this payment limit, the farm bill simply repeals it altogether. No longer would agribusinesses even need to hire attorneys and find loopholes in order to amass millions in taxpayer subsidies. This is the equivalent of "solving" tax evasion by legalizing it. Large commercial farms should expect to collect an even greater share of the subsidies. |