Amateur Megalomania

Republicans Slam Bush Plans for Farm Cuts

I may vote for the party most of the time, since they reflect my views a lot more often than the other side, but I can’t call myself a Republican so long as we have party members behaving like this.

Bush The Spender finally pushed back from the banquet table, much as a 500 lb. man will wave away the after-dinner mint in the name of restraint. But even these small ‘cuts’ are enough to call out the factional interests in the party.

But LaHood told him: “The idea of reducing these payments to farmers is a huge mistake.”

LaHood’s constituents are Midwestern farmers who would suffer less from new payment limitations than Southern growers. Rice and cotton producers would feel the impact most keenly because their crops cost more to grow and get higher subsidies.

Bush proposes to lower the cap on subsidies from $360,000 to $250,000 and eliminate loopholes that let bigger operations claim payments well above the limit.

That’s a whole lot of money, as you well know, and most of our producers can’t sustain any sort of loss because they’re operating on such a thin margin,” said Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, a Missouri Republican whose district has rice and cotton growers.

I always thought the concept of ‘price’ was fairly simple to understand. It is a means of communicating information about a material. If cotton or rice cannot fetch a sufficient price to earn a farmer a profit, then the market is signaling an excess in cotton or rice. DON’T GROW ANY MORE.

Subsidies confuse market signals, allowing dying industries to linger on far past their time. If you continue to prolong the inevitable, you just make the coming collapse even worse. Witness the US Steel industry. People continued to enter that labor pool and plan their lives around it even when the market signals were indicating decline.

George Will wrote this week:

The proposed cut in agriculture spending is supposed to illustrate the budget’s austere leanness. Well.

For 10,000 years — 100 centuries — agriculture was what most people did. In the 20th century that changed, at least in developed countries, which is essentially why they are called developed. So why is America’s 21st-century agriculture so absurdly — so uniquely among all sectors of economic activity — swaddled in government protections?

Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, notes that in the last two years agriculture subsidies, which you might think are supposed to cushion farms in hard times, increased 40 percent while farm income was doubling. The new budget’s risible proposal — a 9.6 percent cut — is, in a dreary sense, a Republican improvement. In August 1986, at the Illinois State Fair, Ronald Reagan’s 11-minute speech was interrupted 15 times by applause for boasts like this:

“No area of the budget, including defense, has grown as fast as our support of agriculture.” And: “This year alone we’ll spend more on farm support programs … than the total amount the last administration provided in all its four years.”

While it pains me to include Ronaldus Magnus in a post critical of Republican excess, I can’t ignore the insanity.

This level of spending is not expressive of conservative values. If George W. Bush wasn’t so good at killing Islamofascists, I couldn’t have possibly voted for him this past November.

Filed under: Economics