Posted on 05/25/2013 12:12:20 PM PDT by IbJensen
(Cartoon by Glenn Foden)
Where do food stamps come from?
They come from taxpayers—certainly not from family farms. Yet the “farm” bill, a recurring subsidy-fest in Congress, is actually 80 percent food stamps and other government nutrition programs.
The food stamps sweeten the farm deal for lawmakers, who admit that the combination works for their political purposes. As Heritage experts Daren Bakst and Diane Katz explain:
The food stamp portion creates a reason for urban representatives to support farm subsidies, and for farm-state lawmakers to support food stamps.
Talk of de-politicizing agriculture programs and welfare policy is met with stiff resistance. For example, Senator Thad Cochran (R–MS), ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, recently told the North American Agricultural Journalists group that food stamps should continue to be included in the farm bill “purely from a political perspective. It helps get the farm bill passed.”
Food stamps are there to help “get the farm bill passed.” And the relation of the rest of the farm bill to farming is also questionable. Bakst and Katz note that “Congress has expanded the farm bill over time into a costly compilation of disparate programs. Along with agriculture and food stamps, the legislation includes dozens of forestry, conservation, energy, and rural development programs.”
It has become the norm that Congress lumps billions—even trillions—of dollars in taxpayer-funded programs together into huge bills. This allows them to sneak in plenty of special-interest pork.
Each of these programs deserves to be evaluated on its own, and taxpayers deserve transparency from Congress about how it plans to spend our money.
For example, food stamps are a massive program that needs a careful look. Food stamp spending has doubled under the Obama Administration, and participation is at historic highs. Recruiters hold bingo games and other “parties” to try to get more people on the food stamp rolls.
Farm commodity programs are also a major concern and in dire need of reform. Congress may eliminate the egregious direct payment program, which pays farmers for doing nothing. However, instead of stopping there, both the House and Senate farm bills would replace direct payments with programs that could wind up being even costlier.
Food stamps and farming ultimately have to do with food, but that’s about all they have in common. Making the farm bill 80 percent food stamps just doesn’t make sense.
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I remember when the evil Roosevelt’s regime bought up enormous supplies of potatoes and had them doused with kerosene and burned. This was in order to keep the price of potatoes up.
He, being a fan of Joseph Stalin, probably thought this more humane than starving the entire state of Idaho to death.
This is the same government, maintaining the same socialist programs...even creating scores more.
A hairdresser’s licensing requires learning some sanitary things you want mandated.
Well, yes they do actually pay people to NOT grow crops on otherwise good farmland. The idea is to keep an appropriate cover crop on the land to keep it ready to put back into production with relatively little effort and to keep the good soil in place during drought conditions.
My grandparents put their land into the program when they retired. Initially, they had just let the land go fallow for a while, so it had reverted back to normal native grass. Of course, this wasn’t good enough for the USDA. They had to rip out all the native grass and replace it with a special designated grass that was imported from Africa.
Last year, someone at the USDA decided that the prairie chickens didn’t like the imported grass, so if we want to keep the land in the system, we have to remove all the (USDA mandated) grass and put in native grass.
In the middle of the biggest drought that has come along in forever. So the land (that was covered with decent grass) now has $5,000 in native grass seed dying under bare ground because it hasn’t rained enough.
Go fig.
That’s a shame; I wish them luck (and rain).
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