Not Holding My Breath For Farm Subsidies to Disappear

The New York Times just ran a six-person discourse on the controversial topic of farm subsidies.  Everyone on the panel that’s not employed by a related industry agrees that it’s time to excise them from our budget.

But, the thing is it doesn’t matter that everybody thinks that farm subsidies are not an economically sound policy. Besides economists working for the big farm lobbyists, scholars agree that they do not promote the general welfare of the economy.  Even politicians, the very ones who amend and add those farm subsidies to the farm bill every five years agree that farm subsidies are bad idea.  However, every five years the farm subsidies continue to exist.  Why?  Because, as they explain,  ” it was politically necessary for me to vote [for the farm bill's subsidies]“.

The farm subsidies are so dear to the constituents of politicians, and therefore the politicians themselves (because, hey, wouldn’t you like to get re-elected?), that they would rather pay millions upon millions of dollars to Brazil to staunch the global outcry over *our* government-propped agriculture system.

Specifically, the Brazilian controversy is about cotton, but it’s a good representative of the top subsidized agricultural crops in the US (the others being corn, wheat, rice, and soy).

That’s right, Brazil’s government threatened to levy huge tarrifs on America’s major exports if we did not abolish our cotton subsidies. Needless to say, our major exporting companies had a thing or two to say about that.  Because our government can’t just change the farm bill (it’s up for renewal every 5 years and the next one is in 2012), they proposed a compromise.  AKA they will bribe the Brazilian farmers. The government will get $147 million to hand out to cotton farmers, if they do not go through with the import tariffs on American goods.  So, yes, we are now subsidizing both American and Brazilian cotton farmers so that American growers can continue to thrive/exist.

So, do I think that the government, our elected politicians will see the madness in the subsidies?  Will they see that paying off two country’s worth of cotton farmers with billions of American tax dollars is not in any way economically sound, especially given our current budgetary deficit?  Well, yes, they will and do see the insanity of it.  But no, they will not change anything, because it’s “politically necessary” to keep them on the books.

I want to see those politicians and their constituents put their agricultural subsidy money where their mouths are and get them to admit that stopping ‘big government’ spending should start at home, or rather on the homestead.

Wisconsin State Journal Farm Bill

November 24, 2010  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Politics

Leave a Reply