The Washington Post has an article on how farm subsidies/aid, with well-intentioned purposes, can grow into a cancer as "jilted" farmers complain that they didn't get a suckle off government's breast.
At first, livestock owners were required to be in a county officially suffering a drought to collect the money. But ranchers who weren't eligible complained to their representatives in Washington, and in 2003 Congress dropped that requirement. Ranchers could then get payments for any type of federally declared "disaster." In some cases, USDA administrators prodded employees in the agency's county offices to find qualifying disasters, even if they were two years old or had nothing to do with ranching or farming.
In one county in northern Texas, ranchers collected nearly $1 million for an ice storm that took place a year and a half before the livestock program was even created. In Washington state, ranchers in one county received $1.6 million for an earthquake that caused them no damage. In Wisconsin, a winter snowstorm triggered millions of dollars more. For hundreds of ranchers from East Texas to the Louisiana border, the shuttle explosion opened the door to about $5 million, records show.
Ronald Reagan once quipped that the nearest thing to immortality is a government program. This article gives us a glimpse into the birth and everlasting life of a drought aid program.
I wonder if there were folks were hoping that the space shuttle Discovery would burn up so they would get a little extra cash.
HT to Park Wilde at the US Food Policy blog.
Update: PowerReader Steve Greenlaw tips me to an earlier WP article on farm entitlements subsidies.
Other federal agricultural subsidies go to individuals who don't even farm. Under a program Congress designed to phase out government subsidies by untying payments from the cultivation of particular crops, Mr. Howell reaps federal dollars from his land as long as he doesn't grow the crops. These "direct payments" to landowners who don't grow any crop have cost the federal government $1.3 billion since 2000. Another thick layer of irony in all of this is that these programs aren't poorly managed. They operate just as Congress passed them.
Did I read that right? Congress is subsidizing landowners to take crop land out of production so that it can phase out subsidies? Oy! Oompa loompa!
Lots of American entrepreneurs take risks every year and don't expect a government safety net; why are American farmers, especially the larger planters who expertly extract government farm entitlements, any more deserving? The case for cutting farm subsidies isn't just about closing trade deals, though, as we argued last week, successful trade negotiations are vital. It's also about fixing a broken, inequitable system at home.
This seems to be a simple case of concentrated vs. disfuse interests: large benefits reaped by a few, well-connected farmers but paid for, directly through taxes and indirectly through the inefficiences inherent in many subsidies, by a large, diffuse group of folks.