Farm Subsidies Balloon

In the last few months, a line of farm and commodity groups have paraded before Senate and House agriculture committees like robots to demand the same thing: more money! Even by Washington standards of wanton greed, the spectacle has been appalling.

More than 20 farm and commodity organizations have called on Congress to approve $9 billion in farmer relief for FY 2001 and $12 billion annually through 2011. These amounts would be in addition to Congressional Budget Office projections for farm program outlays for each fiscal year.

These farm groups argue that the federal government should provide additional agricultural funding "equal to at least the same level of emergency (italics added) economic loss assistance" that was provided for the 2000 crop.

In other words, without the foggiest idea of whether there will be bumper crops, flood or drought or whether crop prices will rise or fall, they want to lock in past spending levels at a minimum and actually increase them by as much as $3 billion annually.

Most of these farm groups believe that agriculture is in a crisis situation because despite $25 billion in farm relief over the last three years, net cash farm income has not set a new record high each year.

In fact, net cash income for 2000 was the fourth largest on record at $56.4 billion. That is only about $2 billion lower than the annual average of $58.1 billion for the record-setting years of 1996 and 1997. In other words, farmers believe they are "entitled" to use tax dollars to increase their incomes to record levels each year.

Some of the farm groups' congressional supporters have the gall to claim that permanent increases in spending, rather than ad hoc increases based on actual need, will somehow benefit taxpayers. The theory is that taxpayers would rather have the farm bailout set excessively high so that the spending amount won't fluctuate from year to year. Following that logic, why not just fund every federal program at its highest level and take even more tax dollars from hard working Americans?

Even one of U.S. agriculture's staunchest advocates, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), seems appalled. Roberts hit the nail on the head in observing that some farm organizations "come to see us not to talk about policy but to say how much money they want," concluding that they (the farm groups) are "treating the U.S. Department of Agriculture like an ATM machine."

However, according to Rep. Charles Stenholm (D-Texas), the ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, "I don't believe you can say that anyone has asked for too much."

As far as these farm commodity groups are concerned, there is no such thing as too much. They will always be "entitled" to more and more.