Freedom Line Blog

Farm subsidies are wrong on principle. It’s fundamentally unjust to take money from taxpayers and funnel it to other citizens just because of the industry in which they work. If farmers need that money to stay afloat, that’s a sign that their business model isn’t working and that they either need to adjust or leave the practice entirely. If they are self-sufficient, then they don’t need the money in the first place.

Even if you accept the case for farm support in the abstract, however, you have to be mortified at how it plays out in practice. As Susan Ferrechio notes in the Washington Examiner:

To illustrate just how far the subsidy program has strayed from its original purpose, [watchdog group] Open the Books calculated payments going to three major cities with few, if any, modern ties to farming: Washington, D.C., New York City and Chicago. Taxpayers sent $30 million to those residents over the past four years to compensate them for converting farmland to conservation areas and for growing soybeans, cotton, corn, rice and other crops.

The big-city farm subsidies show that savvy landowners are legally maximizing a return on their real estate investments at the expense of taxpayers, [Open the Books founder Adam] Andrzejewski said. They buy land, hire a farm manager and collect a check from the federal government, he said.

This would be a good time to remember Nancy Pelosi’s complaint during last fall’s budget negotiations: “The cupboard is bare. There’s [sic] no more cuts to make.” Perhaps the cupboard deserves another look.

You could almost hear environmentalists’ jaws hit the floor this morning when they opened their newspapers and took to their phones and computers for their morning news. In a fierce 4,150-word exposé, the Associated Press dispelled any notion that ethanol is the wonder cure for what ails the environment.

The AP points out that the explosion in corn farming as a result of government ethanol mandates have damaged land, polluted drinking water from fertilizer runoff, and killed aquatic life in rivers and lakes.

To top it all off, the article notes that, “The government’s predictions of the benefits have proven so inaccurate that independent scientists question whether it will ever achieve its central environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases.”

At best, according to the article, ethanol is only 16% better than gasoline when it came to carbon dioxide emissions. And that small 16% benefit comes at a tremendous cost to the environment:

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact.

Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like south central Iowa.

The hilly, once-grassy landscape is made up of fragile soil that, unlike the earth in the rest of the state, is poorly suited for corn. Nevertheless, it has yielded to America’s demand for it.

‘They’re raping the land,’ said Bill Alley, a member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon pharmacy.

All energy comes at a cost. The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and natural gas are well documented and severe. But in the president’s push to reduce greenhouse gases and curtail global warming, his administration has allowed so-called green energy to do not-so-green things.

The AP’s stunning article should send a strong message to Washington about the failure of federal ethanol policies.

About 17,500 newspapers and websites are currently featuring the piece, according to a web search.

Make what you will of the fact that the most provocative stories in the Washington Post come from the Style section, but this one is a doozy:

KERMAN, Calif. — In the world of dried fruit, America has no greater outlaw than Marvin Horne, 68.

Horne, a raisin farmer, has been breaking the law for 11 solid years. He now owes the U.S. government at least $650,000 in unpaid fines. And 1.2 million pounds of unpaid raisins, roughly equal to his entire harvest for four years.

For what offense has our scofflaw earned the contempt of the state? I’ll tell you, but you should probably take a moment to get any sharp objects out of your immediate vicinity:

He said no to the national raisin reserve.

“I believe in America. And I believe in our Constitution. And I believe that eventually we will be proved right,” Horne said recently, sitting in an office next to 20 acres of ripening Thompson grapes. “They took our raisins and didn’t pay us for them.”

The national raisin reserve might sound like a fever dream of the Pillsbury Doughboy. But it is a real thing — a 64-year-old program that gives the U.S. government a heavy-handed power to interfere with the supply and demand for dried grapes.

It works like this: In a given year, the government may decide that farmers are growing more raisins than Americans will want to eat. That would cause supply to outstrip demand. Raisin prices would drop. And raisin farmers might go out of business.

To prevent that, the government does something drastic. It takes away a percentage of every farmer’s raisins. Often, without paying for them.

This, by the way, is not a novel approach for the feds. Back in 2007, George Will noted the practical realities that had galvanized the otherwise moderate (then)Senator Richard Lugar to oppose farm subsidies:

Time was, Riley Webster Lugar, a Hoosier farmer, vociferously disapproved of the New Deal policy of killing baby pigs to control supply in the hope of raising prices. When his son Marvin ran the family farm, if a cashier giving him change included a Franklin Roosevelt dime, he would slap the offending coin on the counter and denounce the New Deal policy of supporting commodity prices by controlling supply — by limiting the freedom to plant.

Today, Marvin’s son Dick is carrying on two family traditions — running the farm and resenting the remarkable continuity connecting today’s farm policies with the New Deal’s penchant for economic planning. The grandson, now 75, is again trying to reform what Franklin Roosevelt wrought.

Lugar is gone from the Senate now, but let’s hope that members of Congress taking up a monstrosity of a farm bill can find the time and will to carve up all provisions that irrationally demand artificial scarcity as a means to abundance.

Last week, here on the blog, I went to town on Senator John McCain for what I viewed as his asinine, borderline incoherent rants about Citizens United specifically and money in politics generally. At the time, I noted offhandedly that while McCain has always been horrible on the issue of political free speech he has much to recommend him in other areas. Happily, only a week later, he’s in the news for one such virtue : his opposition to wasteful spending.

McCain was on the warpath against the waste in the Senate’s version of a farm bill passed late last week, going so far as to produce a top 10 list for Twitter of the most egregious proposed expenditures. The items:

#1 – Creates new USDA office to inspect catfish. FDA already inspects catfish, so this one’s a real bottom-feeder.

#2 – $200 mil Market Access Program promoting brands overseas. Example: Holding “liquor mixology demonstrations” in Russia.

#3 – $25 million to study health benefits of peas, lentils and garbanzo beans. Pretty sure they’re healthy.

#4 – Subsidies for mohair (AKA goat wool), which have cost taxpayers $20 million+ since 1954

#5 – New subsidy for popcorn producers. Yes, popcorn subsidies – after popcorn prices rose 40% in recent yrs.

#6 – $10 million to establish new USDA program to eradicate feral pigs. Talk about pork!

#7 – $15 million to establish a new grant program to “improve” the U.S. sheep industry. A ba-a-a-a-a-a-d idea.

#8 – $700 million for “Ag and Food Research Initiative” funding grants to research pine trees in FL & study moth pheromones

#9 – $40 million in grants from USDA to states to encourage private land owners to use land for bird watching or hunting

#10 – $200 million for “Value Added Grant Program” often used to give grants to wine producers (& cheese makers too) “

All jokes his.

Thanks to McCain, some of the provisions (like the catfish inspection) were stricken from the bill. We’ll have to wait for the legislation to be finished to see how bad the final damage is, but we already know this: the outcome will be better than it would have been had John McCain not been part of the process. For that (and for his statement, quoted in the New York Times over the weekend, that he is ““hard-pressed to think of any other industry that operates with less risk at the expense of the American taxpayer”), he deserves our thanks.

Now if only he’d shut up about campaign finance reform …