[Vision2020] The House Just Wants to Snack

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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July 12, 2013
The House Just Wants to Snack By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html>

And, now, the Tasty Bites theory of government.

You may have heard that the House of Representatives passed a farm bill
this week. Or possibly not. I have found that many Americans can go for a
very long time without mentioning the farm bill. But we are going to talk
about it today, and it will be absolutely fascinating.

For decades, Congress has merged food stamps — which help poor people pay
for their groceries — with agricultural subsidies in one big, messy,
bipartisan farm bill that made everybody happy. Well, not *euphoric*. There
was definitely that messy factor. But it did merge the interests/needs of
urban and rural lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans.

Lately, the House has begun chopping up big, complicated bills into what
Speaker John Boehner once described as “bite-sized chunks that members can
digest.” No more legislative sausage-making. No more bipartisan trading.
The House was going to stick to clean, simple ideas, more along the lines
of Liver Snaps.

So the farm bill got divided. The two parts were not equally tidy. As Ron
Nixon reported in The
Times<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/18/us/politics/fraud-used-to-frame-farm-bill-debate.html>,
the rate of error and fraud in the agricultural crop insurance program is
significantly higher than in the food stamp program. Also, the agriculture
part has a lot of eyebrow-raising provisions, like the $147 million a year
in reparations we send to Brazil to make up for the fact that it won a
World Trade Organization complaint about the market-distorting effects of
our cotton subsidies.

And while food stamps go to poor people, most of the farm aid goes to
wealthy corporations.

So House Republicans passed the farm part and left food stamps hanging.

Say what?

Tea Party conservatives have an all-purpose disdain for anything that
smacks of redistribution of wealth, and food stamps are a prime target.
“The role of citizens, of Christians, of humanity, is to take care of each
other. But not for Washington to steal money from those in the country and
give to others in the country,” said Representative Stephen Fincher of
Tennessee during a speech in Memphis.

So the food stamp program was the total opposite of a Tasty Bite to House
Republicans. More like that Scottish thing with sheep stomach and oatmeal.
But the agriculture part was billed as delicious restraint. They rallied
behind the just-farm-stuff bill in a party line 216-to-208 vote.

“This is a victory for farmers and conservatives who desired desperately
needed reforms to these programs,” said Representative Eric Cantor, the
majority leader.

The House bill actually spent more money on subsidies for farmers than the
bipartisan Senate version the Republicans scorned. It also dropped the
Senate’s limit on aid to farmers with incomes of more than $750,000 a year.
And while it mimicked the Senate in dropping most of the much-derided
direct payments to farmers, the House gave cotton farmers a two-year
extension.

Let’s take a special look at cotton, which is a particularly good example
of the tendency of agricultural benefits to flow uphill. “Some of these
guys — and they’re all guys — are getting more than $1 million in support.
The bottom 80 percent are getting $5,000 on average,” said Scott Faber of
the Environmental Working Group.

Faber’s organization, which keeps careful track of these things, says
direct payments to cotton farmers since 1995 have totaled $3.8 billion.
That does not count the annual $147 million the United States has been
sending to Brazil in hush money.

Crop insurance gets bigger under the new plan. Here’s how: You, the
taxpayer, fork over the majority of the cost of the farmers’ policy
premiums. (Up to 80 percent in the case of cotton.) Also, you spend about
$1.3 billion a year to compensate the insurance agents for the fact that
they have to sell coverage to any eligible farmer, whatever his prospects
for success. Plus, if yields actually do drop, you have to compensate the
insurance companies for part of the cost of claims.

Is this beginning to sound a little like Obamacare? No! No way! The House
Republicans hatehatehate Obamacare! They vote to repeal it as often as they
change their socks! Because Obamacare will, you know, distort the natural
operation of the markets.

The larding of benefits to farmers didn’t come up during the House debate.
It was all about food stamps, and Democrats asking to know why their
colleagues wanted to cut aid to hungry children and old people. During an
Agriculture Committee meeting on the bill, Representative Juan Vargas of
California quoted Jesus’ lesson that “whatever you did for one of the least
of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

That raised Representative Fincher’s hackles. “Man, I really got bent out
of shape,” he told that Memphis audience, proudly reporting that he
countered with Thessalonians: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not
eat.”

By now, you must be wondering why I keep bringing up this guy. Fincher is a
farmer who has, over the years, received $3.5 million in federal
agricultural subsidies, much of it for — yes! — cotton.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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