Farm Welfare: Bipartisan Consensus Can’t Even Cut This
With complaints about insufficient “welfare” for the poor, how in the world do we justify welfare for businesses, in this case for companies that grow food? Is food so hard to grow that taxpayers need to be burgled in order to give money to farmers? Don’t we have a $9 trillion national debt that requires finding budget cuts? And haven’t we heard how our Corporate Welfare for Farmers hurts farmers in overseas developing, poor countries? (Speaking of poor countries, new research shows cutting developing country tariffs may not only build their economies, but also raise revenue).
And now, we discover that some Farm Bill payments go to United States SENATORS.
How freakin’ hard is it to cut spending, if we can’t even cut Farm Subsidies, which everyone wants to cut????
And now we learn from the National Taxpayers Union Foundation that Speaker Pelosi’s (D-CA) Democrat Congress is the biggest spending one in nine Congresses- $470.1 billion.
November 7th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Greg Reynolds at Instapundit (http://www.instapundit.com/) blogged on this as well:
HERE’S A SURPRISE: “Farm Payments Benefited Legislators:”
When the bill that would extend farm subsidies for five years goes to the Senate floor this week, eight senators will have special reason to pay close attention: They or their relatives collected about $3 million in federal payments from 1995 to 2005, according to government records compiled by a non-partisan environmental group. . . .
Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., says the system works well. He and his family’s farming interests received almost $2.4 million in federal payments from 1995-2005, records show. His net worth in 2005 was $1.7 million to $6.6 million, according to his financial disclosure statement. “He has firsthand experience of how this really benefits farmers,” said his spokeswoman, Angela Guyadeen.
I imagine he does . . . .
November 7th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Speaking of corporate welfare pork, here’s a google earth map of where pork goes:
http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/a_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_words
let’s see…and how do those areas vote?