Farm bill money in wrong pockets

By The News Virginian Staff

Published: April 19, 2008

Having endured the withering recognition that U.S. farm aid is a boondoggle of biblical proportions, federal lawmakers have responded in the fashion of Rehoboam, increasing the empire’s burden on the backs of the people. Spending in the farm bill, over which the gang on the Hill acquired an extra week to tussle, would inch up by another $10 billion.
Fat subsidies to corporate farms and wealthy farmland owners — most egregious among the slew of traditional excesses — rural economic development, school lunches and agricultural land preservation all are covered under the $280 billion legislative behemoth. Most of the extra spending would flow to disaster relief, nutrition and conservation.
Of all people, Rep. Collin Peterson, a Minnesota Democrat, has emerged as a champion of fiscal prudence, urging the whittling of billions of dollars in spending and tax breaks from a Senate version of the bill, but his is the proverbial voice in the pork-barrel wilderness.
So the combatants have shifted their gaze to a $2.4 billion slice of the farm pie, which the Senate would devote to, among other things, a hastened rate of depreciation, in the books at least, of racehorses, along with investments in biofuels and wind farms (don’t tell Sen. Edward Kennedy) and aid for disabled and retired farmers.
Ignoring the possibility that a sliver of this proposed money might simply be distributed to the cutting room floor, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in a typical tizzy, suggesting that the allotment instead be spent on food programs for the poor. Persuaded that an additional $500 million for nutrition programs is insufficient to sate her political cravings, Pelosi, according to a Wall Street Journal report, spoke with ordinary restraint, telling Senate Finance Committee Chairman and fellow Democrat Max Baucus that she did not wish to be “responsible for taking food from babies.“
Lost amid visions of starving children and depreciating racehorses is a plan crafted by Peterson and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, that would have increased spending by a mere $6 billion, which in the vernacular of Washington qualifies as remarkable prudence. Most pointedly, their proposal included so-called adjusted gross income spending caps, which translated in language familiar to most of the rest of us, equates to people of less-than-limited means being forced to hit up someone other than the federal government for money.
Under previous guidelines, of which there were, essentially, none, famed agrarians such as NBA star Scottie Pippen and late-night TV show host David Letterman collected thousands of dollars in federal farm subsidies despite being unable to distinguish a hay rake from a fork lift.
President Bush has threatened to veto the farm bill unless it imposes a $200,000 annual income cap for individuals receiving subsidies. Goodlatte and Peterson proposed a sliding scale of caps starting at $500,000 next year and dropping to $300,000 by 2013. The House put the limit at $1 million and the Senate at $750,000.
All of these things considered, Bush, that cold-hearted panderer to the rich, proves the true class warrior, while the lawmaking crowd in Washington staggers around meaningful reform as though it were a contagion.
We hope the president stands by his veto pledge. Otherwise, the affluent ranks of what legislation refers to as “absentee farmers” like Pippen and Letterman will remain free to feed from the overflowing government trough.