Congress Goes Hog Wild With Farm Bill

[AZXD]

Originally Posted by one-eyed-fatman

I feel the same way about those running for office. Who you worried about more? Me or them?

Dark alley or midday ... Unfair question .. Comparing a smart dangerous person to idiots .. They might be as dangerous, but they lack the intelligence to be .....

[AZXD]

I like alfalfa

If we didn't feed the planet (now make agrifuel) ...
We could stop all of this .. along with the ills of international goodwill mandates and the twisting of lives that such agreements produce. The local BS has a purpose and it has nothing to do with less than International AgriBusiness.

[XDConvert9mm]

Originally Posted by Delija

If I ever have the chance, I'll make you a martini you'll be certain to enjoy. The cigar deal? Had the same experience myself. Even with Cubans.

OEFM takes a little more effort and patience. What might help is imagine a really good guy, a guy you'd like in general, but he's in unimaginable discomfort.....like a late stage cancer patient. But in this case the pain he's feeling is as if he has knives stuck into his gut. Attacked by big business....knife in the belly. Attacked by big government....knife in his left kidney. Attacked by annoying children who think they know everything on an internet gun owners web-site....a knife in his groin. Plus bee stings all over from local government....his mayor is probably a piranha locked onto his big right toe. Local sheriff probably elected in a rigged election and is a rabid weasel chomping on one hand and his inbred nephew, the deputy sheriff chomping on the other.

So you should have a bit of empathy. Pain makes anyone crotchety. But underneath? Pure flawless diamond! I kid you not!

Of course I may be a bit biased.....OEFM is great-grandfather on my mother's side.

LOL

Peace,
D.

Since you put it that way, how can I resist the little portly guy in pain?

I'll be in Minneapolis at the end of next month for a couple of days. If you'll still be there and are serious about that Martini conversion, PM me.

[AZXD]

Originally Posted by Delija

If I ever have the chance, I'll make you a martini you'll be certain to enjoy. The cigar deal? Had the same experience myself. Even with Cubans.

OEFM takes a little more effort and patience. What might help is imagine a really good guy, a guy you'd like in general, but he's in unimaginable discomfort.....like a late stage cancer patient. But in this case the pain he's feeling is as if he has knives stuck into his gut. Attacked by big business....knife in the belly. Attacked by big government....knife in his left kidney. Attacked by annoying children who think they know everything on an internet gun owners web-site....a knife in his groin. Plus bee stings all over from local government....his mayor is probably a piranha locked onto his big right toe. Local sheriff probably elected in a rigged election and is a rabid weasel chomping on one hand and his inbred nephew, the deputy sheriff chomping on the other.

So you should have a bit of empathy. Pain makes anyone crotchety. But underneath? Pure flawless diamond! I kid you not!

Of course I may be a bit biased.....OEFM is great-grandfather on my mother's side.

LOL

Peace,
D.

Hmm .. Not sure about that ending ... But these things happen when you are brave enough to take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes
Really!!

[Etta Place]

May 19, 2008
Greedy Government vs. America's Freedom
By Deroy Murdock

Americans finally will start working for themselves today rather than for their government masters. This milestone arrives two days later than in 2007, clearly proving that the era of big government is back with a vengeance. May 19 is Friedman Day, when the Massachusetts-based American Institute for Economic Research calculates that citizens finally will have toiled long enough to fund local, state, and federal spending.

Freidman Day is not to be confused with the Tax Foundation's Tax Freedom Day, when Americans' aggregate annual income collectively finances each year's municipal, state, and national taxes. This year's Tax Freedom Day fell on April 23, three days earlier than in 2007. "Tax Freedom Day shows that Americans are working fewer days to pay their taxes now than they did in 2000," AIER's Kerry Lynch wrote last April 15. Tax Freedom Day peaked on May 3, 2000, near the end of President Bill Clinton's administration but before President G. W. Bush signed multiple tax cuts.

Lynch added: "Friedman Day shows that it is not because the government is spending less, but because it is borrowing more, in the name of tomorrow's taxpayers."

The late, great Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman would be pleased to see Americans devoting less wealth to paying taxes. However, the man for whom Friedman Day is named would be saddened, but probably not surprised, to see Americans dedicating more blood, sweat, and tears to finance government spending.

"I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible," Friedman told writer John Hawkins in September 2003. "I believe the big problem is not taxes," Friedman continued. "The big problem is spending. The question is, 'How do you hold down government spending?' Government spending now amounts to close to 40 percent of national income, not counting indirect spending through regulation and the like. If you include that, you get up to roughly half. The real danger we face is that number will creep up and up and up. The only effective way I think to hold it down, is to hold down the amount of income the government has. The way to do that is to cut taxes."

Up and up and up perfectly describes the path of federal spending, which constantly rises, as if gravity were reversed. In good times, Washington politicians spend the revenues that economic growth generates. In bad times, bailouts and handouts abound. Entitlements flow, no matter what. Between fiscal year 2001 and FY 2009, the federal budget has soared 66.8 percent, from $1.86 trillion to $3.1 trillion. These 8.35 percent average annual spending increases have cascaded from a Republican presidency and a mainly GOP Congress.

Today's Democrat-controlled House of Representatives continues this fiasco. It approved a $307-billion farm bill on May 14, by a vote of 318 to 106. The Senate endorsed this largesse the following day, 81 to 15. Among other damage, this legislative monster gives $3.8 billion in disaster assistance to those who already have received $5.2 billion in direct payments for their "historical planting average," even if they have stopped farming. While typical GIs in Iraq and Afghanistan (unmarried E-4s with four years' service) dodge and, too often, catch bullets for just $41,591 annually, couples with yearly incomes up to $1.5 million still can receive agricultural subsidies. Democrats consider these wealthy growers rich enough to slam with tax hikes, yet poor enough to soothe with farm welfare. Which is it?

Meanwhile, calamitous ethanol assistance survives, dreadful sugar supports expand, and those who cultivate lentils, chick peas, salmon, and even race horses join the dole. Want a new tractor? Uncle Sam will help you buy one.

Greedy politicians who use taxpayers' money to buy the votes of equally greedy farmers collectively soil common decency. Furthermore, they are an international embarrassment to a nation that still claims to be Earth's chief repository of limited government and free-market capitalism.

These trade-distorting subsidies likely will encourage foreign countries to erect retaliatory barriers. Perhaps America's already porcine farmers will balloon into morbid obesity by wolfing down the wheat, soybeans, and rice they soon may have trouble exporting.

While record-high agricultural prices cause belt-tightening at home and food riots overseas, this farm bill cruelly demonstrates that most Washington politicians don't give a damn about anything but their reelection prospects.

"Pain at the grocery checkout line? Starvation abroad? Whatever. Just keep me inside the Beltway."

Republicans are supposed to squelch such rubbish. And yet 100 House Republicans approved it. GOP voters, already disgusted by Republican profligacy, will find this betrayal of their party's core principles enervating. Democratic voters will back their party's genetic big spenders, rather than the GOP's hypocritical posers. In an effort to "save" farmers who never had it so good, congressional Republicans have put themselves in mortal danger on Election Day.

Until then, Americans should consider a question as relevant now as when Milton Friedman asked it in 1962's Capitalism and Freedom: "How do we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?"

Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution.

Page Printed from: RealClearPolitics - Articles - Greedy Government vs. America's Freedom at May 20, 2008 - 07:11:03 AM PDT

[Etta Place]

May 20, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Talking Versus Doing
By DAVID BROOKS

In 1965, Mancur Olson wrote a classic book called “The Logic of Collective Action,” which pointed out that large, amorphous groups are often less powerful politically than small, organized ones. He followed it up with “The Rise and Decline of Nations.” In that book, Olson observed that as the number of small, organized factions in a society grows, the political culture becomes more divisive, the economy becomes more rigid and the nation loses vitality.

If you look around America today, you see the Olson logic playing out. Interest groups turn every judicial fight into an ideological war. They lobby for more spending on the elderly, even though the country is trillions of dollars short of being able to live up to its promises. They’ve turned environmental concern into subsidies for corn growers and energy concerns into subsidies for oil companies.

The $307 billion farm bill that rolled through Congress is a perfect example of the pattern. Farm net income is up 56 percent over the past two years, yet the farm bill plows subsidies into agribusinesses, thoroughbred breeders and the rest.

The growers of nearly every crop will get more money. Farmers in the top 1 percent of earners qualify for federal payments. Under the legislation, the government will buy sugar for roughly twice the world price and then resell it at an 80 percent loss. Parts of the bill that would have protected wetlands and wildlife habitat were deleted or shrunk.

My colleagues on The Times’s editorial page called the bill “disgraceful.” My former colleagues at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page ripped it as a “scam.” Yet such is the logic of collective action; the bill is certain to become law. It passed with 81 votes in the Senate and 318 in the House — enough to override President Bush’s coming veto. Nearly everyone in Congress got something.

The question amid this supposed change election is: Who is going to end this sort of thing?

Barack Obama talks about taking on the special interests. This farm bill would have been a perfect opportunity to do so. But Obama supported the bill, just as he supported the 2005 energy bill that was a Christmas tree for the oil and gas industries.

Obama’s vote may help him win Iowa, but it will lead to higher global food prices and more hunger in Africa. Moreover, it raises questions about how exactly he expects to bring about the change that he promises.

If elected, Obama’s main opposition will not come from Republicans. It will come from Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill. Already, the Democratic machine is reborn. Lobbyists are now giving 60 percent of their dollars to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The pharmaceutical industry, the defense industry and the financial sector all give more money to Democrats than Republicans. If Obama is actually going to bring about change, he’s going to have to ruffle these sorts of alliances. If he can’t do it in an easy case like the farm bill, will he ever?

John McCain opposed the farm bill. In an impassioned speech on Monday, he declared: “It would be hard to find any single bill that better sums up why so many Americans in both parties are so disappointed in the conduct of their government, and at times so disgusted by it.”

McCain has been in Congress for decades, but he has remained a national rather than a parochial politician. The main axis in his mind is not between Republican and Democrat. It’s between narrow interest and patriotic service. And so it is characteristic that he would oppose a bill that benefits the particular at the expense of the general.

In fact, in this issue, McCain may have found a theme to unify his so far scattershot campaign. He has always been an awkward ideological warrior. In any case, this year may not be the best year for Republicans to launch a right versus left crusade. But McCain has infinitely better grounds than Obama to run as a do-what-it-takes reformer.

He has a long record of taking on not only the other party, but his own. In the current Weekly Standard, the brilliant young writer Yuval Levin suggests that McCain put reforming America’s decrepit governing institutions at the center of his presidential race.

Levin points out that the health care system, the immigration system, the regulatory system and the entitlement system all need reforms. Instead of talking about personal honor or perpetual tax cuts, McCain should focus relentlessly on modernization.

In fact, Monday in Detroit, McCain declared: “In all my reforms, the goal is not to denigrate government but to make it better, not to deride government but to restore its good name.”

Obama, sad to say, failed the farm bill test. McCain may have found a theme for a nation that has lost faith in its own institutions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/op...ml?ref=opinion

[eric_t12]

if they really want to 'help the farmers' financially, why dont they tax them less?





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