11.2.2007 6:35 AM

Used to Be a Farmer? Here's $26 Billion

Farm Bill Pays Many, and Lavishly, for No Apparent Reason

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Photo: René Mansi / Istock

By Dan Shapley

Only Congress could design a program to stop paying farmers subsidies for growing crops by paying them subsidies for no reason at all. The farm bill now being negotiated has $26 billion in direct payments to farmers, regardless of how much they grow, how well it grows, who pays how much for what's grown -- or whether they grow anything at all. Or are even still living.

That's $26 billion, with a B -- about half as much as Congress wanted over five years to fund children's health, and 75% of the amount needed for the slimmed down proposal. (President Bush vetoed the first, has threatened a veto of the second, and has repeatedly registered his displeasure with a business-as-usual farm bill.)

Such is the sorry state of farm subsidies, according to a new report by the Environmental Working Group, as written about in the San Francisco Chronicle today.

Congress designed a program to pay farmers directly 12 years ago to ween them off farm subsidies some had come to rely on. Now, instead of rewarding farmers who grow the food Congress deems most important, or prop up farms that fail because of bad weather or overseas competition, they just reward people who got subsidies in the past.

Your tax dollars at work.

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