By their fruits shall ye know them

Astonishingly, there is something in Shrub's budget that actually is a good idea. The details might be argued, but the idea is sound. Specifically, according to the March 12 Winston-Salem (NC) Journal, quoting AP, he proposes to cut subsidy payments going to large farm operations.

Bush wants to lower the maximum subsidies that can be collected each year by any one farm operation from $360,000 to $250,000. He also asked Congress to cut by 5 percent all farm payments, and he wants to close loopholes that enable some growers to collect millions of dollars in subsidies every year.

The farm subsidy program has been riddled with, as the right wing loves to call it, "waste, fraud and abuse" for some time. A program that was intended for the noble purpose of enabling family farmers to carry on has been largely hijacked by "family farms" that are in fact huge corporate enterprises. Scaling back the maximum and closing loopholes is a worthy idea. (The across-the-board cut is an entirely different matter, since some smaller farms that can really use the subsidies still receive them.)

I mean, my gosh, even the Heritage Foundation, not known for its hostility to corporate interests, declares that the largest, most profitable farms get the vast bulk of the assistance: In 2001, the biggest 10% of farm operations received 73% of the subsidies; in 2002, the largest 10% bagged just under two-thirds of the total amount distributed. Some of this was supposedly repaired by the changes passed in 2002, but the basic fact that the bulk of the money goes to a relatively small number of corporate farms has not changed.

The figures are made even more dramatic when you realize that the subsidy program affects only a handful of crops, with just five - wheat, corn, cotton, rice, and soybeans - getting the lion's share of the cash, according to the February 18 New York Times, which went on to note that two-thirds of US farmers get nothing at all from the program.

Those five crops are, as the Times says, the big players on the world market, which means as much as anything else the farm program is actually an export subsidy. But because the amount of the subsidy is based on production, the program actually encourages overproduction, which helps to drive down prices of the very crops that it supposedly supports.

But there's another, related, effect, less noticed but even more important: Even as the program gives to the rich here, it takes from the poor there, as another unexpected voice - a February 25 editorial in the Washington Times - notes:

[T]he farm subsidies in rich countries are edging out farmers in poor countries that do not receive government payments. The subsidies cause so much overproduction that food prices have plummeted. So while U.S. food surpluses have been used to feed the needy abroad, they are also devastating farmers in the developing world.

That is, we are helping to create and maintain the very food shortages were are magnanimously claiming to be helping to alleviate.

So all in all, this is one "Big Government" program that certainly deserves a close look. And of course, it won't get one.

Washington (Reuters, February 17) - [T]he House Agriculture Committee met and flatly opposed the administration proposals. The panel approved a letter saying "we should let programs operate as designed," which was sent to the House Budget Committee.

Now, the spectacle of a bunch of Republicans declaring that we should "let [government] programs operate as designed" is almost funny enough to make this whole business worth it. And perhaps it would be were it not for the fact that the GOPpers want to keep the farm subsidies by finding "savings" elsewhere. Specifically,

Republican committee chairmen are looking for savings in nutrition and land-conservation programs that are also run by the Agriculture Department. The government is projected to spend $52 billion this year on nutrition programs such as food stamps, school lunches and special aid to low-income pregnant women, and children. ...

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said that the $36 billion food-stamp program is a good place to look for savings.

"There's not the waste, fraud and abuse [I told you they love that phrase] in food stamps that we used to see.... That number is down to a little over 6 percent now," Chambliss said. "But there is a way, just by utilizing the president's numbers, that we can come up with a significant number there."

In simpler terms, Chambliss proposes to starve the poor to feed the rich. This at a time when, according to UNICEF, the US ranks at the bottom among rich nations in the area of child poverty, with a child poverty rate of 22%. This at a time when, in the words of Jim Weill, the president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC),

the program's very lean and doesn't give people enough anyhow. The benefits are less than people need. The program's not reaching even three-fifths of the people who are eligible. And the abuse rate is very low and is going down further.

And this at a time when Shrub is proposing cuts that would drive more than 300,000 people off Food Stamps, a program that already eliminates those with more than $2000 in countable assets and declares a family of four with a gross annual income of just $24,516 is too rich to deserve even the least help.

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" (Matthew 7:15-16)

Beware even more of false prophets trying to protect false profits.