Pork In The Farm Bill

In a bipartisan development, Democrats and Republicans team up, again, to mug taxpayers.

It’s been overshadowed by the hoopla surrounding the State of the Union, but we have finally had an outbreak of bipartisanship in Washington. Of course, bipartisanship means, as it usually does, that Democrats and Republicans have teamed up to mug taxpayers: An agreement has finally been reached on a new farm bill.

The farm bill will cost taxpayers about $950 billion over the next ten years. Lawmakers are calling this a $23 billion cut. But as Veronique de Rugy and my colleague Chris Edwards have pointed out, 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!

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