- The national debt is fast approaching $17 TRILLION, or over a $50,000 debt burden for every man, woman, and child in the country. Given the debt situation, no tax dollars should be wasted in any form whatsoever.
- There are over 20 million Americans who are either unemployed or under employed in the country. Given this horrid employment situation, any tax dollars that could retrain Americans for work would be a societal benefit.
- While the average household income for all American households has dropped considerably SINCE THE RECESSION ENDED, the household income of the wealthier households in this country has risen over the past several years.
- Major diseases such as cancers and aging diseases in our aging population still take a horrific toll on our citizens. Any tax dollars that could stem the medical and personal suffering costs of these Americans would be both humane and pay dividends down the road from decreased national health care costs.
I put forth these realities in the context of the Federal government’s farm bill. The August 16, 2013 issue of The Week magazine put forth a scathing and fact filled review of the farm bill and farm subsidies and how waste, stupidity, and political cronyism are all at work with this bill.
As you read through the following facts, as laid out in The Week’s weekly Briefing column, think about whether the farm bill’s funding is better spent making the wealthy wealthier or if that taxpayer wealth should be repurposed back into the wallets of poor and middle class families to increase their shrinking household income, used to relieve our overbearing national debt burden, retrain Americans for employment, or be diverted into medical research for the pressing diseases of our time. I will tell you ahead of time, based on The Week’s research, any of these efforts would certainly be more worthwhile than what the Washington political class is doing with our money today relative to the farming industry.
The following facts, realities, and disgraces is what the article, along with other data from cited and related sources, found out to be true:
1) In the past 10 years, the Federal government has given the farm industry $168 billion of taxpayer wealth, used to theoretically protect farmers from the fates of weather, price, and economic conditions.
2) Thus, the average American family annually gives farmers and farming companies/conglomerates about $1500 over that time frame.
3) But this money does not typically go to small, family farms. 75% of the $168 billion payout went to just the biggest 10% of farm-related companies such as Riceland Foods, Inc., Pilgrims Pride, Inc., and Archer Daniels Midland, all hardly quaint, small family farms.
4) As a background fact, in 2012, Archer Daniels Midland’s financial statements show a gross operating revenue of about $89 BILLION and a profit of over $3.4 BILLION. Makes one wonder why every American taxpayer needs to pay taxes to subsidize payments to a mega-profitable company like this.
5) But it is not just big companies that receive taxpayer farm support. The Week article points out that Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, former President Jimmy Carter, and media mogul Ted Turner also get paid handsomely for the “farm property” they own.
6) Some quick research from the Celebrity Net Worth website estimates that Springsteen is personally worth $200 million, Bon Jovi is worth about $125 million, Carter is worth about $5 million, and Turner is worth about $2 billion. Which raises the same question that we posed relative to companies like Archer Daniels Midland: why are these fabulously rich people getting taxpayer money under the farm subsidy program?
7) Over the past ten years, farm subsidies have been paid out to over 1,500 residents of Manhattan in New York City. 374 of these payouts have gone to people living in the wealthy and posh Upper East Side of Manhattan, hardly a poverty area or a farming mecca. A sample of those in NYC who have gotten taxpayer farm money include:
- Mark F. Rockefeller (yes, of those Rockefellers) was paid $342,634 NOT to farm his land in Idaho.
- A managing director of Wells Fargo bank.
- A neurologist.
“Payments are going to people in Manhattan who have simply invested in farmland and are about as far away from farmland as you can imagine. That should really make people wonder what on earth has happened to the farm program,” Craig Cox of the Environment Working Group.
8) All farmers have seen double digit growth in the value of their farmland in each of the past three years despite droughts and high temperatures.
9) The average annual household income of farmers is about 60% higher than the average household income of all American families.
10) “The typical American farmer has literally millions of dollars of wealth,” according to Dan Sumer, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Davis. You cannot make that statement for the vast majority of American households who actually pay the farm subsidies.
11) The farm subsidy bill actually pays some farmers NOT to grow crops into order to keep crop prices high, i.e. you reduce supply and prices go up. Thus, the American consumer not only pays for farmers not to grow crops but they then get whacked again with higher prices at the supermarket.
12) As with many Federal government programs, the farm subsidy fiasco was meant to be a temporary short term fix to the problems facing farmers during the Great Depression. Over 70 years later, what was supposed to be temporary is now pretty permanent.
What a disgrace. Higher prices for consumers, more wealth for the wealthy. If any program was ripe for getting terminated in these times of high taxes and higher national debt, it would be the entire farm subsidy infrastructure.
So why hasn’t it been killed for the good of the country? As The Week correctly points out, the only reason it exists is politics. Many of the farmers and farming conglomerates that receive taxpayer wealth are in states that lean Republican. Historically, the food stamp and food assistance Federal programs were hidden in the farm bills of the past, a key aspect for Democrats.
Thus, the farm bill ensures that major constituents of both parties get wealthy at our expense while incumbent Washington politicians get continual funding for their perpetual reelection campaigns. Everybody wins except the poor and middle class taxpayers in this country who fund this circuit of corruption. We will explore this corruption more fully tomorrow and why it persists.
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