Posted on 11/26/2001 11:44:11 AM PST by Native American Female Vet
Government for the first time to subsidize insurance for hog farms
By Associated Press, 11/26/2001 15:36
WASHINGTON (AP) The government is offering subsidized insurance to livestock farms for the first time, in the form of policies that will protect hog producers from drops in income.
The policies will be offered on an experimental basis in Iowa, the nation's largest hog producing state, according to the Agriculture Department's Risk Management Agency. One type of coverage will protect against drops in hog prices. A second will be tied to fluctuations in hog prices and feed costs.
The government already heavily subsidizes the cost of insurance for grain, cotton and other crops.
Demand for the hog policies will be determined in large part by the premiums, said Steve Cohen, a spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council. The policies will provide a way for farms to manage their risk other than by contracting for the sale of their animals, he said.
The insurance will be limited to small and medium-size farms that sell no more than 32,000 hogs a year. Sales of the policies will start next spring.
On the Net:
Risk Management Agency: http://www.rma.usda.gov
You and me (the taxpayer) are paying for the insturance of hog farms. In other words, these hog farmers are using unscrupulous politicians to pick the pockets of the rest of us. B@stards!
A "die-hard conservative," Richard Nixon, gave us price control and other hard-left economic and social policies. Nixon even claimed that "we are all Keynesians now" ... just before Keynesian economics would be challenged by the stagflation of the mid-/late-70s.
Fast-forward thirty years, and we have another "die-hard conservative" (or so the Establishment has told us ... and we have sheepishly accepted) ... and we're getting more of the same from our government - paternalism/socialism. I'm just waiting for Bush to say: "we are all socialists now."
Over the next few years, it will be interesting to watch how far Bushpiles on FreeRepublic are willing to bend before they are finally convinced that their man is not what they thought he was (i.e. conservative).
There is nothing mysterious about it all ... and it's really not Bush's fault. Since WW-II, public policy hasn't really been influenced by who resides in the White House (or Congress). We've moved away from the Constitution and towards socialism under both political parties. And that is according to plan.
FROM: http://www.conservativebeacon.com/essays/Liberalism/lib_vs_lib.htm
Speaking about the "General Welfare" clause of the U.S. Constitution:
"With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers (enumerated in the Constitution) connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators." (James Madison, author of the Constitution)
1792 - Congress appropriated $15,000 to assist some French refugees:
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." (James Madison responding disapprovingly)
1829 - House of Representatives considered a bill to appropriate money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer:
"Mr. Speaker--I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the suffering of the living, if there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member on this floor knows it. We have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I ever heard that the government was in arrears to him." (Colonel David Crockett)
1854 - Congress passed a bill to "help" the mentally ill:
"I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity. [To approve such spending] would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded." (Franklin Pierce, our 14th president, upon vetoing the bill)
1887 - Congress passed an appropriation bill to "help" drought-stricken counties in Texas:
"I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds. ... I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution. I do not believe that the power and duty of the general Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering.... A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the Government the Government should not support the people.... Federal aid in such eases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our National character." (Grover Cleveland, our 22nd and 24th president, upon vetoing the bill)
Thomas Jefferson, in his Message to Congress on December 2, 1806, discussed the possible use of surplus revenue in areas that would require a constitutional amendment prior to disbursement. He made it clear that any money for education would have to be authorized by an amendment, and could not be appropriated under the existing Constitution:
"application to the great purposes of the public education ... and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of federal powers ... I suppose an amendment to the constitution, by consent of the States, necessary, because the objects now recommended are not among those enumerated in the constitution, and to which it permits the public money to be applied."
Thomas Jefferson, forever concerned that the general-welfare clause might be perverted (1798):
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated."
South Carolina Senator William Drayton, responding to federalists who began to argue that the general-welfare clause gave Congress a generalized spending authority (1828):
"Can it be conceived that the great and wise men who devised our Constitution, should have failed so egregiously as to grant a power which rendered restriction upon power practically unavailing? If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into execution whatever can be effected by money?"
Franklin D. Roosevelt, while Governor of New York, acknowledged that the Constitution precluded federal interference in education. Though no friend of the Constitution once elevated to the presidency, in an address delivered on March 2, 1930 Governor Roosevelt correctly asserted:
"As a matter of fact and law, the governing rights of the States are all of those which have not been surrendered to the National Government by the Constitution or its amendments. Wisely or unwisely, people know that under the Eighteenth Amendment Congress has been given the right to legislate on this particular subject [prohibition], but this is not the case in the matter of a great number of other vital problems of government, such as the conduct of public utilities, of banks, of insurance, of business, of agriculture, of education, of social welfare and of a dozen other important features. In these, Washington must not be encouraged to interfere."
Hogs and politicians. How do you tell them apart?
The hog doesn't steal your wallet...
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