Tag: farm bill
Castrating Conservative Principles In Iowa

Castrating Conservative Principles In Iowa

There exists a government boondoggle that offends conservatives, liberals, environmentalists, oil refiners, cattle ranchers and taxpayers alike. It’s not easy to get that kind of Kumbaya going, but the corn-based ethanol program has done it.

This has put Joni Ernst, the Tea Party favorite for Iowa’s open U.S. Senate seat, in an awkward position. The Republican has vowed to both end government subsidies and preserve the freight loads of taxpayer dollars chugging into Iowa’s corn belt in the name of ethanol.

Her footwork goes as follows: She says she’ll end this subsidy when every other subsidy in the American universe also gets the ax. And, she forgot to add, when Martians colonize Neptune.

Thus, Ernst has castrated a bedrock conservative principle as easily as the pigs she claims to have desexed on her family farm.

Two fierce winds have made it especially thorny for conservatives to justify blowing huge sums on energy projects — for oil and gas in Alaska, as well as for ethanol in the Corn Belt.

One is the conservative respect for market forces. A boom in production has actually created an energy glut. The global price for oil recently sank below $90 a barrel.

The other is the successful conservative crusade to curb federal spending. There’s less money sloshing around for dubious programs, as well as the noble ones.

“National support for the ethanol program is collapsing as the reality of corn ethanol has become more and more apparent,” Craig Cox of the Environmental Working Group told me. EWG has been a forceful critic of U.S. farm programs and their impact on the environment.

The ethanol giveaway comes on top of the usual bonanza of farm subsidies. But now, because of the ethanol craze, “farmers trip over themselves planting every square foot they can find with corn,” said Cox, who’s based in Ames, Iowa.

The result has been fouled water supplies. There’s also a soaring world price for food — and for feed, hurting pig farmers and cattle ranchers.

Oil refiners are also taking it on the chin. Today’s big ethanol subsidy comes in the form of a mandate requiring refiners to blend 15 billion gallons of ethanol into motor fuels by 2015.

“There’s only so much ethanol that can be blended into the U.S. gasoline supply,” especially as fuel consumption declines, Cox noted. The blend is typically 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline.

The current flashpoint is a pending Environmental Protection Agency decision to possibly roll back the mandate. The American Petroleum Institute is leading the charge for that.

By the way, the one compelling rationale for ethanol was that it would reduce carbon emissions. And the blending mandate theoretically rests on ethanol’s cutting those greenhouse gases by 20 percent.

Recent science shows that on the contrary, ethanol increases them. But no matter.

“The funny little secret,” Cox said, “is the fine print in the 2007 energy law, which exempts all existing ethanol plants or plants that commenced construction from that requirement.” In other words, all 15 billion gallons stay.

Before we go, let’s make of a point of not pinning a medal on Ernst’s Democratic foe, Bruce Braley. He’s all for the ethanol scam. Liberals who support government programs should feel a special duty to weed out the dodgy ones.

Am I being unfair and unrealistic? After all, this is politics, and the corn folks make up a good hunk of Iowa’s voters.

Well, here’s the deal for Republicans: If you want to transfer huge sums of other taxpayers’ money into local scams, go ahead and try. Just expect to be mocked every time you call yourself a conservative. OK?

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Screenshot: YouTube

Want more political news and analysis? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!

Upside-Down Tea Party Dogma in Arkansas

Upside-Down Tea Party Dogma in Arkansas

When we moved to our Arkansas cattle farm, a friend lent us a book titled A Straw in the Sun. Published in 1945, Charlie Mae Simon’s beautifully written memoir of homesteading here in Perry County, Arkansas during the 1930s was long out of print—maybe because the hardscrabble life it depicts is too recent for nostalgia.

Like much of the rural South before World War II, Perry County was essentially the Third World. So was Yell County, immediately to the west, home of U.S. Senate candidate Tom Cotton. Except for a lot of wasteful government spending he affects to deplore, it would still be.

Cotton’s campaign against Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Pryor reflects everything upside-down about Tea Party dogma and the tycoons who fund it—a local story with national implications.

Originally featured as New Yorker essays, Simon’s book wasn’t intended as social protest. Even so, many forget that millions of Americans lived as subsistence-level peasant farmers within living memory.

Simon and her neighbors grew their own food and slaughtered their own hogs; they cut firewood, dug wells, built outhouses, made candles and fermented corn liquor. Electricity and telephones weren’t available; cash commerce all but non-existent. To file her essays, Simon walked hours to the general store or hitched rides on mule-drawn wagons along dirt roads that became impassible in wet weather. The simple life proved terribly complicated.

During the same period, writes historian S. Charles Bolton in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, roughly 1/3 of black and 1/5 of rural white Arkansans emigrated to places like Chicago or Los Angeles. Others found work in town. Today, large parts of Perry and Yell counties are in the Ouachita National Forest. They had more residents then than now.

But here’s the thing: Contrary to Tea Party fantasies, it wasn’t plucky private entrepreneurs that paved the roads, strung the wire, saved grandpa from penury and made organized commerce across the rural South possible. It was federal and state investment.

Even today, such prosperity as Yell County enjoys—it’s the 64th wealthiest of Arkansas’s 75 counties—derives from timber cutting and the proximity of three scenic lakes built and maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Not to mention, of course, agricultural price supports from the 2014 Farm Bill that Rep. Cotton voted against.

But enough history. There’s plenty of strictly contemporary reality that self-styled “conservatives” also ignore. In TV commercials, Cotton depicts himself as the dutiful son of a “cattle rancher” who taught him farmers can’t spend money they don’t have.

Cotton’s father does run a small cattle farm near Dardanelle. However, it’s also a fact that Len Cotton retired as District Supervisor of the Arkansas Health Department after a 37-year career. The senior Cotton has also served on the Arkansas Veterans Commission, the Tri-County Regional Water Board, etc.

The candidate’s mother Avis taught in public schools for 40 years. She retired in 2012 as principal of the Dardanelle middle school. Career government bureaucrats, both, bless their public-spirited hearts.

So I’m guessing Len Cotton raises cattle for the same reasons I do: because it’s an absorbing hobby with considerable tax advantages.

Meanwhile, the thing about the Farm Bill that urban liberals often don’t get, and that a poser like Tom Cotton’s being disingenuous about, is this that it’s damn near impossible to farm without risking money you don’t have.

The largest recipient of agricultural subsidies in Arkansas is Riceland Rice—a member-owned co-op representing 5,800 farmers.

Farmers who have to pay for seeds, fertilizer, and diesel fuel to pump water; also to finance tractors and combines more costly than the land. Farmers who borrow every spring in the hope of turning a profit in the fall. And who risk losing the entire crop to pests, floods, drought, tornadoes, to cheap soybeans from Brazil, etc. If there’s fraud and waste, cut it out. However, it’s in the national interest to keep agriculture strong.

But let’s head back to town, shall we? One of the fastest growing GOP strongholds in Arkansas is the college town of Conway, just across the Arkansas River. Tom Cotton’s sure to do well there.

And why does Conway prosper? Basically, government largesse. Located along Interstate 40, it’s the home of the University of Central Arkansas, a growing state school. It’s got a brand-new, federally-funded airport, two private colleges supported by state scholarships funded by the Arkansas Lottery, and an excellent non-profit hospital (Medicare, Medicaid), etc.

The city’s biggest private employers are Internet-oriented Acxiom and Hewlett Packard. (Pentagon researchers created the Internet.) Furthermore, everybody in Conway receives electricity, water, sewage, cable TV, Internet and telephone service from the Conway Corporation—a city-owned co-op begun in the 1920s, as efficient an example of municipal socialism as you’ll find this side of Stockholm, Sweden.

Dogma notwithstanding, all successful modern economies are mixed economies.

No politician who tells you differently is your friend.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Farm Subsidies Reveal Congressional Double Standard

Farm Subsidies Reveal Congressional Double Standard

Congress has left me confused. Stunned, actually, as well as bewildered, chagrined and slightly depressed. The GOP-dominated House has passed a bill that defies compassion, mathematics and common sense.

OK, so there’s nothing unusual about that. Point taken.

But the recent passage of a farm bill, after months of delay, is an especially sharp example of congressional priorities — protect the rich and punish the poor, comfort the comfortable while brutalizing the afflicted. The bill will cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), usually known as food stamps, while preserving subsidies for farmers, most of whom could get by quite nicely without help.

By contrast, many Americans are struggling with a globalized, roboticized economy that has devalued the average worker. The new economy has forced down wages, eliminated job security and abandoned traditional perks such as pensions. It is quite possible to work 40 or 50 hours a week and still need help to put food on the table, as the managers of food pantries around the country will attest.

Yet, congressional observers are predicting that the farm bill will pass the Senate and get President Obama’s signature. While most Democrats don’t like the cuts, the current bill, they figure, is the best they can do. It takes about 1 percent from SNAP — around $800 million a year in the $80 billion-a-year program — but that’s less than conservatives had initially sought.

Still, if Republicans really care about deficits, if they really want to rein in government, if they believe people ought to stand on their own two feet and refuse the “welfare state,” why are they preserving welfare for those who need it least? Do they not see the glaring hypocrisy in their insistence on farm subsidies?

The bill does end the least politically defensible part of farm welfare: direct payments, paid to farmers whether they plant or not. But it continues a host of other unnecessary programs that cost billions — including crop subsidies and crop insurance. Indeed, the bill increases some crop subsidies, such as those to Southern peanut farmers. And the remaining programs are just as bad as the direct payments.

Take crop insurance, which has its roots in the Dust Bowl era. Though conditions have changed substantially since then — the small family farmer has virtually disappeared — crop insurance has mushroomed. In 2012, according to The Insurance Journal, taxpayers spent $14 billion insuring farmers against a loss of income. Is there any other business in America that gets that sort of benefit? Aren’t farmers supposed to be entrepreneurs willing to take risks?

This farm welfare comes at a time when agricultural income is soaring. Last year, farm income was expected to top $120 billion, its highest mark, adjusted for inflation, since 1973, the Insurance Journal said. Lots of millionaires and billionaires are on the list of those receiving the assistance.

One case of mind-boggling hypocrisy is that of U.S. Rep. Stephen Fincher, a Republican and a farmer from Frog Jump, TN, who collected nearly $3.5 million in subsidies from 1999 to 2012, according to the Environmental Working Group. In 2012, he received $70,000 in direct payments alone — again, money paid to farmers whether they plant or not. (Can anyone say “moochers” and “takers”?)

Fincher, however, supports draconian cuts to food stamps. During a congressional debate over the SNAP program, he said, without apparent irony: “We have to remember there is not a big printing press in Washington that continually prints money over and over. This is other people’s money that Washington is appropriating and spending.”

I don’t know why the cognitive dissonance doesn’t make his brain explode.

Fraud, by the way, is rampant in farm subsidies, although you’re unlikely to hear anything about it. While the occasional welfare cheat or food stamp grifter is held up as an example of widespread abuse, neither politicians nor reporters talk much about the fraud involved in agricultural programs. You have to burrow into reports from the Government Accountability Office for that. They point to millions stolen by farm cheats.

It’s enough to make you wonder what the food stamp critics are really upset about. Government spending? Or giving the working poor a little more to eat?

(Cynthia Tucker, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a visiting professor at the University of Georgia. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

AFP Photo/Scott Olson

Farm Bill Compromise Cuts Food Stamps For 850,000 Families

Farm Bill Compromise Cuts Food Stamps For 850,000 Families

Congressional negotiators announced on Monday that they’d reached a deal on a farm bill that saves $24 billion over the next decade and includes an $8 billion cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – the program responsible for providing food stamps to millions of Americans nationwide.

“Today’s bipartisan agreement puts us on the verge of enacting a five-year farm bill that saves taxpayers billions, eliminates unnecessary subsidies, creates a more effective farm safety net, and helps farmers and businesses create jobs,” head of the Senate Agriculture Committee Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) said.

Over the summer, tensions mounted as the Democratic-controlled Senate passed legislation that would have cut the food stamp program by $4.1 billion over 10 years, while the GOP-controlled House introduced a nearly-five-times-greater $20 billion cut over the same time period.

The House is expected to vote on and advance the bipartisan deal, with House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) calling the bill a “step in the right direction.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said the bill’s new provisions “will reduce the deficit and cut waste and fraud, all while protecting hungry children and families.” He and others also say that the new energy-assistance provision finally closes a SNAP loophole Congress never intended for – one that some argue increases welfare fraud. 

The proposed bill raises the amount to qualify for additional SNAP benefits from $1 in federal heating assistance to a minimum of $20, closing what has been called the “Heat and Eat” loophole. This will cut benefits for approximately 850,000 households by an average of $90 a month.

The Senate is expected to vote on the bill sometime next week, but Democrats seem more split over their support for the compromise.

Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), and a member of the farm bill conference committee, says the Senate needs to “concentrate” on passing the “sound, balanced, bipartisan bill.”

Some of his colleagues, however, feel that the yearly $800 million food stamp cuts are just too steep. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) blasted the cuts and accused the negotiators of “trying to ram this thing through before anyone has a chance to read it.”

The bill also includes $200 million in funding for 10 states to begin job-training pilot programs and an additional $205 million in increased assistance for food banks.

AFP Photo/Scott Olson