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Old 02-11-2005, 07:36 PM   #2
dude1394
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Default RE: Farmers Betrayed By Bush

As usual a hot bush bash comes over the wire and without a seconds thought(or probably even an actual read) it gets posted by the vin-meister. You think a farmer getting 250,000 in subsidies might have a little strangeness going on? The subsidies were intended to support smaller famers but the majority of them are very,very large. That's why bush wants to cap it.

And of course, if bush does what he thinks is right with his own constiuency he's called heartless, not politically courageous. Who would expect a liberal to argue FOR corporate welfare, only in the continuing to dwindle leftist dem party. I do as usual expect little or no thougth before something is posted however and that continues to be a truisim. Whatever?

Per [Lowry]http://dallas-mavs.com/forums/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=21506[/l]
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The Bush administration is set to take on one of the great scandals of American governance: a system of farm subsidies so perverse that it should get whatever the equivalent of an NC-17 rating is for a federal program. Decent people everywhere should want to avert their eyes. In seeking to cut and reform the subsidies, President Bush will provoke a fight every bit as fierce, in its own way, as that over Social Security, prompting opposition from the forces of greed and political cowardice.


Farm subsidies as we know them grew up around the Great Depression, when they didn't work particularly well, and they have maintained their tradition of not working for more than seven decades now. As the New York Times recently reported, farm income doubled during the past two years, and — holy soybean! — farm subsidies still went up 40 percent. Farmers game the commodity markets to get both high prices for their products and high federal subsidies. It goes to show that few things are as addictive and distorting as a government handout.

The system is supposed to help family farms — but if this is a family-farm-friendly government program, what would a hostile one look like? Family farms aren't big enough to garner the largest subsidies and are squeezed by the way the federal payments increase land values and stimulate overproduction. "The subsidies reward the guy who gets higher yields with higher subsidies, and he's able to buy out his neighbor and get even bigger," says Dennis Avery, an agriculture expert at the Hudson Institute.
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