Mr. President, End this Farm Subsidy Boondoggle

TCSDaily ^ | February 27, 2009 | Amanda France

[steelyourfaith]

Before taking office, President Barack Obama pledged to cut government waste: "We cannot sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness." Yet after signing the $410 billion omnibus (the largest annual increase in 30 years) on top of the gargantuan $787 billion spending package with questionable items to "stimulate" the economy, it seems like what is bleeding is that promise's credibility.

[steelyourfaith]

"As the financial crisis deepens, the destabilizing effect of subsidies needs to be reexamined. If President Obama is ever to make up for the current spending spree, he must confront and eliminate boondoggles like the Commodity Credit Corporation."

[kittymyrib]

Farm subsidies are the third rail for the Democrat party: Congress critters know that if they touch it, they will die in the next election. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) said yesterday that that part of the budget will not be passed...he and other farm state politicians will see to that.

[Wolfie]

Exactly. Ain’t gonna happen. Unless, of course, the people who gobble up the farm subsidies up and vote out their representatives who protect them. Sometimes I crack myself up.

[Wolfie]

Let me rephrase:

Unless, of course, the people in those States that don't have anything to with farm subsidies manage to overpower the big Agri-Business lobbies that represent the huge farming interests that gobble up the subsidies. Again, it is to laugh.

[Kakaze]

Oh no, Senator Lugar, will be deeply saddened.

He's the farm subsidy king....well until now, now he's growing 600 acres of black walnut trees to trade on the Chicago Carbon Exchange.

Nothing like voting yourself a new graft.

[Piquaboy]

I have know from day one, BO does not know how to tell the truth.

[SampleMan]

The truth is that farmers don't take farm subsidies. People who want to purchase or hold onto land that they would not otherwise farm take the subsidy. CRP subsidies only amount to less than a 1% return.

This is bad for farmers because the subsidy allows non-farmers to pay more for land and for retired farmers to take their land out of the market place.

Once CRP was instituted, I watched as the area I grew up in Missouri quickly became predominantly owned by city gentry looking for a place in the country.

[org.whodat]

The truth is that farmers don't take farm subsidies. People who want to purchase or hold onto land that they would not otherwise farm take the subsidy. CRP subsidies only amount to less than a 1% return.

This is bad for farmers because the subsidy allows non-farmers to pay more for land and for retired farmers to take their land out of the market place.

Once CRP was instituted, I watched as the area I grew up in Missouri quickly became predominantly owned by city gentry looking for a place in the country.

Dead on excellent.

[wheezewiz]

A related issue is sugar quotas. The US government instituted quotas on imported sugar to “protect” the sugar industry, predominantly in Florida, and mainly south of Lake Okeechobee. This has resulted in sugar prices in the United States of five times the world price. This is led to the replacement of sugar with high fructose corn syrup in nearly all of our sweetened beverages, and many other products. There are now many reports of adverse health effects from consuming high fructose corn syrup, including obesity.

Another impact of the sugar quotas is that land south of Lake Okeechobee has been increasingly used for sugar production. Swamps have been drained to make new farmland. This resulted in a great reduction of the natural flow of water from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades, and the fertilizers and other chemicals used in producing sugar cane has further harmed the health of the delicate ecosystem. Many immigrant workers had to be brought in to farm the sugar plantations.

Now, of course, with our new environmental consciousness, the US and Florida governments want to buy back that land to restore it to its natural condition. So the sugar producers made gobs of money by charging inflated prices for sugar, and now they are going to make gobs of money by reselling the land to the government at inflated prices. And, of course, the immigrant farmworkers will still be here. What a country! It’s hard to imagine how the sugar lobby got so much power with the federal government.

[SunkenCiv]

The Bum Rap on Biofuels
American Thinker | 5-13-08 | Herbert Meyer
Posted on 05/14/2008 3:59:06 AM PDT by Renfield
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2015711/posts

Campaign to vilify ethanol revealed
ethanol producer Magazine | May 16, 2008 | By Kris Bevill
Posted on 05/17/2008 9:22:13 AM PDT by Kevin J waldroup
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2017389/posts

thanks Gabz for this:

Nation’s Food System Nearly Broke
Madistan.com | February 26, 2009 | John Kinsman
Posted on 02/27/2009 2:07:46 PM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2195759/posts

and thanks george76:

Wolves kill 11 sheep at ranch
The Billings Gazette | 2/28/2009
Posted on 02/28/2009 9:43:31 AM PST by george76
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2196230/posts

[george76]

Jeff Hawn likely got some of this gentleman rancher pork.

http://www.theflume.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=2&ArticleID=5920

[muawiyah]

We have two major climate related situations getting set to make the nearterm future quite miserable for billions of people.

One is the arrival of the NEXT ICEAGE. It's possibly as much as 5000 years overdue, but there has always been some range of variation in the matter ~ never mind that it's happened pretty much on schedule 20 times in the last 2 million years!

The other is a precursor to the ICEAGE ~ it's called severe drought brought by cooler dryer air. We have lots of it. Drought in Argentina. Drought so bad in Australia even the normally humid tropics are burning off in vast fires. Drought in China's wheat belt. Drought in Russia's wheat belt. Drought in every part of the United States except Iowa.

It does not look good this year.

And what is Obama doing about it? Well, he's trying to help the ICE AGE come back sooner with his risky cap and trade scheme. He's trying to disrupt normal agricultural processes by distorting the markets.

It's only going to get worse.

[Freedom56v2]

bump

[steelyourfaith]

Obama is on record, at least under his name, to end wasteful government spending. To wit: The O'Reilly Factor from February 18, 2008.

Guest Karl Rove and host Bill O'Reilly discuss the happenstance of numerous faintings recently occurring at B.O. rallies and B.O.'s plagiarism of Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick's phrases.

Then, beginning at about 5:15 of this 8:54 clip, Karl Rove reports that B.O.wrote in one of his books that progressives should have the courage to end government spending programs that don't work, but when B.O. was on Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked him for an example, B.O. went in vain search of a thought.

Transcript:

Rove: ... I think one of the earliest times I saw this was on Meet the Press a year ago (2007) when he (Obama) was asked about his book in which he said that "...progressives had to demonstrate their fiscal responsibility by having the courage to end government spending programs that don't work ..." and Tim Russert threw the quote up and said, "Give me an example...", well, he'd supposedly written it in his book, supposedly you'd think would have thought through what the answer to that was and he didn't have an answer. So he finally said to Tim Russert, "... well, I think what we ought to do is we ought to use electronic billing in Medicare and Medicaid and it would save us hundreds of millions of dollars if we required physicians and health providers to bill everything electronically ..." Well, starting about 2003, the federal government has a rule in place that says that everybody has to bill Mediaid and Medicare electronically, so less that 0.001% of all transactions with Medicare and Medicaid come in paper, all the rest is done electronically. He'd written it in his book but he didn't have the answer, and when he came up with the answer it was a completely phony one.
O'Reilly: (crosstalk) Yeah, but he didn't write it. No ... very few politicians write their books.
Rove: (crosstalk) ... but at least his name was on it, so you'd think he would have read it, and say what's the answer.
O'Reilly: (crosstalk) I'm not defending. I'm just clarifying that we don't know any politicians that write their books.

Click image to launch: "Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly discuss Barack Obama's Problems" (2/18/08) (8:54 video)

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks SYF!

[steelyourfaith]

Ending Farm Welfare As We Know It
Why can't we get rid of agricultural subsidies?
by A. Barton Hinkle | April 19, 2011 | Reason Magazine