“Obama Goes After Farm Subsidies”. No, not really.
In a speech just concluded (11/25/2008) announcing two more economy appointees — CBO chief Peter Orszag to the Office of Management and Budget and Robert Nabors (House Approp. Comm.) to be his deputy — President-elect Obama gave an example of one piece of wasteful government spending: farm subsidies.
Obama cited a GAO report out yesterday that said from 2003 to 2006, “millionaire farmers” got $49 million in farm subsidies despite earning more than the $2.5 million cutoff in annual income.
“If it’s true,” Obama said, “it’s a prime example of waste.”
With the announcement, Obama joins a long and largely defeated line of presidents and officials who’ve tried to kill farm subsidies, a perk as deeply ingrained in a nation built on the Jeffersonian Agricultural Ideal as any other.
Obama did not say he would dismantle the subsidy infrastructure in the Farm Bill. He did say, however, that he would go after its misuse. The $2.5 million cutoff was in response to the outcry over the Farm Bill’s $5 billion (a year) worth of automatic payments, “mostly to farmers of five crops – corn, wheat, cotton, rice and soybeans – giving two-thirds of the money to the top 10 percent of growers” (San Franciso Chronicle). But, as the Washington Post enumerates, a long line of presidents has tried to get rid of the illogical subsidies. As some will recall, the death of McCain’s campaign in Iowa was sealed in part when he said he would end the subsidies on corn. The graphic below demonstrates to what extent Iowa depends on those subsidies financially:
It’s a lot. Consequently, farmers and lobbyists are not going to watch the end of agribusiness subsidies without a fight. Can you blame them for it, though? Yes, yes I can.
Big conglomerate agribusinesses do not deserve handouts (listening GM? Ford?). Good business practices profit without financing from the government. It’s how capitalism works.  Why can’t farming work the same way? The problem is that Farm Bill subsidies were structured for a specific time in American history.  The Farm Bill subsidies stem historically from the Depression Era when the whole market was collapsing and farmers needed help in order to keep feeding the US. The subsidies made food artificially cheap so that bread/soup lines could at least function. Today, the subsidies are like a vestigial organ–they don’t really do anything and, like tonsils, need to be removed if causing damage. And, they are. Farm Bill subsidies still keep food cheap and, since the US market overflows with those goods (and the bread lines are few these days), the cheap food is exported to the global market. Essentially we export the US’s economic mess abroad by disrupting local food growers’ economies. These agribusiness subsidies are simply no good, I say. Subsidies should be for creating health in a system, not wealth.
Anyway, Obama didn’t say he was going to throttle the whole subsidy system. Even if he tried to do so, Obama won’t be able to fight the subsidy machine by himself. That would be political suicide.  Politicians from both sides of the aisle, and from rural and urban areas, would have to come together to overhaul the Farm Bill and its damage to the free market. And, although Obama raised my expectations and hopes for the new administration, he did not make me believe in miracles.
November 26, 2008
Tags: agriculture, Barack Obama, farmers, Health, policy, subsidies Posted in: Health, Politics
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