Farm subsidies don't lack for critics. Free-market conservatives and welfare state-defending liberals alike have called for deep cuts in these payments to farmers. After all, farmers, as a group, are wealthier than the average American. Why should they get tens of billions of dollars each year in federal aid?
Two years ago, when the most recent Farm Bill emerged from Congress, the measure's authors proudly announced what sounded like bold cuts in these controversial programs. The Senate Agriculture Committee noted in a press release that the new law would eliminate one big subsidy altogether and save taxpayers a total of $23.3 billion over the following 10 years.
Those projected savings, it turns out, were a mirage. According new estimates for Farm Bill spending over the next few years released by the Congressional Budget Office, total government aid to farmers will swell to $23.9 billion in 2017.
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5 comments:
How many of our friends in the legislative branch have a monetary interest in receiving farm credits?
Crop farmers are just like welfare recipients but with political connections. They have more lobbyist and lawyers than the Clintons.
They are trying to bring down the best hope for Americans future because he does not support their welfare programs.
Farm subsidies should be abolished or they should be available to the real true family farms also. This is why they have to charge so much more for their product. They aren't being subsidized by tax payers. Only those who contract w/big agribusiness get these entitlements to keep commodity prices higher or so is the excuse given by the government. I don't blame it so much on the farmers but on who they grow for which are huge corporations. If they paid the farmers more, they wouldn't need the subsidies.
For years farmers were paid to not grow crops on their land. This was simply another form of welfare. And now the chemical companies are getting rich for the additives (GMOs) to seeds to increase farmers' yields. And those companies tested their own products and deemed them safe. Right! How many of you have had any strange allergies or upper respiratory problems in recent years that you didn't have 20 or 30 years ago? Ag lobbyists are powerful in DC, which is another reason to elect someone who is not an insider and who will look out for all Americans first and foremost.
It's nothing more than farmer welfare. Plus you can tell who gets it when some farmers around here plant crops and do not harvest them. They let them rot in the field. Plus most farmers around here do not grow crops for human consumption. They grow crops for animals.
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