I thought folks on that side of the aisle were anti big-business, and pro small farmer. Per the San Francisco Chronicle:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi signed off Friday on a five-year farm bill that would keep multibillion-dollar subsidies flowing to cotton, corn and a handful of other crops, deeply disappointing Bay Area food and environmental activists who had hoped that Congress might shift federal farm policy this year to combat obesity, air and water pollution and industrial farming.
Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat, hailed as reform legislation that would grant subsidies to farmers earning up to $1 million—five times more than the cap sought by the Bush administration—while increasing actual payments to farmers. The bill comes during the most prosperous era American agriculture has seen in decades as crop prices and farm income approach or set record highs.
As to why we’re seeing such an expansion of bread and circuses, the Chronicle notes:
Pelosi’s prime motivation in supporting the current farm policy apparently is to preserve the re-election prospects of freshman Democrats in rural districts who toppled Republicans in November and helped secure Democrats their House majority and Pelosi the speakership. Nine of the freshmen sit on the House Agriculture Committee. Several said they feared any vote to reform farm programs would endanger their political prospects.
The Chronicle article is chock full of criticism from activists who would prefer that the subsidy money be spent elsewhere.
I have enough farming in my family to appreciate that smaller farm operations do face revenue challenges, and that federal stabilization is appreciated. However, I can’t help but think that this is additional money being spent to buy votes, rather than attempting to optimize that stabilization in the grand economic scheme of things.
If that’s true, then perhaps folks should be asking why is the money being spent at all, rather than asking for a simple redirection of funds.
With the country running a deficit now, and a bunch of OASDI (Social Security) trust fund IOU’s starting to come due in a few years, the country would be best served by learning that your outgo can’t exceed your income for too long without disaster ensuing.