The Patriot Post® · Plowing the Farm Bill

Lost in the arguments over the budget and debt ceiling in the last few months was another disagreement over the fate of a wide-ranging 959-page farm bill formally called the Agriculture Act of 2014. At one time House Republicans crowed about two major accomplishments in reauthorizing the spending: a separation of the actual farming portion of the bill from food stamps that account for the bulk of the spending, and then cutting $40 billion from food stamps over a 10-year period. The federal food stamp program is known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

But yet again we’re not surprised that House negotiators wimped out when push came to shove. The bills were reunited in conference, thereby making the food stamp program, which is rapidly becoming a staple of middle-class life for working-age Americans, the largest part of the farm bill for years to come. They also ratcheted down the promised $4 billion in annual spending-growth cuts to a paltry $800 million. Moreover, while the House successfully ended the $5 billion direct payment program, they didn’t eliminate other subsidies, including a sugar subsidy that, for one thing, has driven a significant portion of our candy manufacturing to other countries. All told, the new farm bill reduces spending growth by a paltry $1.6 billion annually – a total that could easily be wiped out if a modest additional increase in SNAP occurs.

While reversing the trend toward making farmers wards of the government by eliminating all risk was perhaps too lofty of a goal – one farm-state Republicans reject outright anyway – the modest cuts announced by the House Agriculture Committee are little more than a rounding error in overall spending while maintaining an unsustainable status quo. Indeed, Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute notes, “The farm bill will cost taxpayers about $950 billion over the next ten years. Lawmakers are calling this a $23 billion cut. But … this is a cut only in the Washington sense of spending less than previously predicted. In reality, it represents an inflation-adjusted $258 billion increase over the ten-year cost of the last farm bill, in 2008. That’s a whopping 37 percent jump in real spending!”

As agribusiness has consolidated from a patchwork quilt of more than six million mainly small family farms during the Great Depression to a far smaller segment of the population, the goal of farm subsidies has evolved from helping to feed the family and having a little left over to sell to making millions from government assistance. The “farm” portion of the bill is now little more than corporate welfare that artificially props up the price of food. And then we use food stamps to pay consumers to buy the food. That way Democrats and Republicans both get all the pork they want. No wonder costs are exploding.

> Update: The bill passed the House, 251-166. It had the support of 162 Republicans and 89 Democrats, while 63 Republicans and 103 Democrats voted “no.”