America’s
breadbasket is enduring a drought, one that stretches from Indiana
clear to California and ranks among the worst in recent history. And
conveniently located in the middle of it is the swing state of Iowa,
where President Obama on Tuesday took the natural disaster as an
opportunity to demagogue to farmers and get in his knocks against
the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Representative Paul Ryan (Wis.).
After announcing some $170 million in pork spending in the region (as
the vice president would say: literally — the government is buying $100
million worth of swine from farmers in an effort to offset crop
failures), Obama called out Ryan for being “one of the leaders of
Congress standing in the way” of
disaster relief, and urged a crowd to “tell him how important this farm bill is to Iowa and our rural communities.”
We suspect Congressman Ryan is well aware. Because of the ongoing
gridlock over that farm bill — which includes drought relief — Ryan
voted for, and the House passed, a narrow $383 million emergency relief
measure and sent it to the Senate. But instead of quickly passing and
signing it, President Obama and his Democratic allies are holding the
Midwest hostage in the name of passing a $1 trillion big-government
goodie bag laden with useless subsidies and unprecedented welfare
spending.
Part of the problem with the Senate version of the farm bill, and
one source of conservative opposition to it, consists of its treatment
of handouts to agribusiness. Dust Bowl–relic farm subsidies had been
targets of umpteen generations of conservative reformers before Newt
Gingrich’s House finally seemed to slay them in 1996. But Big Agro has
proven to have a slasher-film villain’s knack for reanimation, and
billions in “direct payments” to farmers — meant to facilitate the
transition to a free market and to end in 2002 — never stopped, and
instead turned into a very different kind of cash crop for the country’s
biggest farms. Instead of righting this, the Senate farm bill
repurposes about $5 billion from the “direct payments” program to expand
government crop insurance and fund a “shallow loss” program that
effectively guarantees farmers’ revenue against falling commodity prices
and could end up costing taxpayers multiples of the subsidies it
replaces.
Still, it would be one thing if quibbles over the contours of zombie
subsidies were the only thing separating conservatives from
the White House
on the farm bill. But the fact is that the fairest portion of the
bill’s price tag, nearly $800 billion over ten years, comes from
food stamps
— which, needless to say, enjoy only a thoroughly mediated relation to
farming. But even though food-stamp rolls have spun out of control under
the current administration, the Senate’s version of the farm bill
contains just $4.5 billion in cuts to the program, and the House
Agriculture Committee’s is not much better at $16.5 billion.
That’s simply not enough for conservative reformers in the House,
including Paul Ryan, whose budget would wind food-stamp spending down to
what it was before 2008 (hardly an epoch without a safety net) and
disburse funds as block grants to the states.
Food stamps are currently the nation’s second-largest
welfare program,
behind Medicaid, and account for fully two-thirds of the Department of
Agriculture’s budget. The standard liberal line that the program’s rolls
have expanded because of the recession doesn’t scan: They have expanded
in good times and bad, from one in 50 Americans in the 1970s to one in
seven today, including a surge from 30 million enrollees to 46 million
under this administration. A better explanation is so-called
“categorical eligibility” standards, which state that individuals who
receive other federal welfare benefits are presumptively eligible for
food stamps, and which are so loosely interpreted that some states
consider receiving a welfare brochure close enough for government dole.
(Under the program as currently structured, a state that makes more
people eligible can transfer federal dollars to its citizens at almost
no cost to itself.) As if that wasn’t bad enough, President Obama’s
stimulus further eroded the eligibility standards by suspending the work
requirements for the able-bodied.
Ryan and other House reformers support a version of the farm bill
that would begin to reverse these disturbing trends. If the president
and Democrats in the Senate oppose it, let them fight on the merits.
Instead, the president is blaming Paul Ryan for standing in the way of
drought relief when it is the White House’s commitment to expanding
(corporate and individual) welfare that has left Iowa high, and dry.
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