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Commentary By Brian Riedl

Congress Finds Bipartisanship in Farm Welfare

Where is gridlock when you need it?

Who says bipartisanship in Washington is dead? Republicans and Democrats have once again unified in support of shoveling $20 billion in annual subsidies to wealthy agribusinesses. A House–Senate conference committee is expected to finish the latest farm-bill reauthorization within the next month. And while the legislation is currently bogged down by partisan disagreements over its welfare benefits for low-income families (SNAP, or food stamps), the welfare benefits for large corporations are enjoying a bipartisan lovefest. Indeed, corporate welfare was the glue that held the legislation together through its initial passage in the House and Senate.

Which is a shame, because farm subsidies are simply the most illogical, destructive, and incoherent waste of money in the federal budget. These massive special-interest handouts survive on several arguments straight out of the 1930s.

The first argument from subsidy defenders is that subsidies keep small, struggling family farmers afloat. Norman Rockwell imagery aside, farm subsidies are America’s largest corporate welfare program. By purposeful design, most farm welfare goes to the largest10 percent of farms — the commercial farms whose owners report a median household income of $200,000 and a median household net worth of $2.8 million. Small farms not only receive few subsidies, but they are actively harmed by the rising land prices and industry consolidation that results from Washington subsidizing their larger, wealthier competitors.

Over the past few years, the farm economy has cooled off from the historic boom that prevailed earlier in the decade. Yet farmers’ incomes still far exceed the national average (despite often living where the cost of living is lower), the farmer poverty rate is just 2 percent (compared with 14 percent across the economy), and farm debt-to-asset ratios are healthier than those in most industries. Farm subsidies today are distributed to large agribusinesses, celebrity hobby farmers, members of Congress, and even wealthy Beverly Hills and Manhattan families who passively own farmland elsewhere.

Continue reading the entire piece here at National Review Online

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Brian M. Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Previously, he worked for six years as chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) and as staff director of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. Follow him on Twitter here

This piece originally appeared in National Review Online