The Conservative Revolution

Hat tip to Red State for this great piece on Republicans who voted for the farm bill.

No one who voted for this should ever be called a conservative without an asterisk. A great big one.

Well put. As Istook points out, the farm bill will redistribute income from the middle class to wealthy farmers. Shame on my senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison for voting for this atrocious bill.

Another good quote from Istook’s piece:

Forget the Bridge to Nowhere. This $300-billion giveaway farm bill is a far worse example of special-interest excess. It panders to every special interest group, at the expense of common-sense and contrary to the claims by many Congressmen and Senators that they would control spending.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial team wrote a great piece for yesterday’s paper. It points out some of the many disastrous policies that Congress is considering. Subsidies, mandates and other market distortions are leading to food riots around the world. Yet, politicians in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere continue to meddle in the food markets, causing economic pain and even increasing hunger. The farm bill is a good case study in how government planners cannot allocate resources as efficiently as the market. As Dick Armey reminds us, “The market is rational, but the government is dumb.” Here are some highlights from the Journal’s piece.

This year farm income is expected to reach an all-time high of $92.3 billion, an increase of 56% in two years, making growers perhaps the most undeserving welfare recipients in American history. But that won’t stop this bill from passing the House and Senate by wide margins…

The White House and liberal reformers calculate that farm owners with clever accountants can have incomes of up to $2.5 million and still get a taxpayer handout…

And once again the big sugar plantation owners in Florida walk away with the sweetest deal: Big Sugar bagged an increase in price supports and a guarantee of 85% of the domestic sugar market at these guaranteed prices. So taxpayers are on the hook for buying surplus domestically produced sugar at 23 cents a pound and selling it for ethanol for closer to three cents a pound.

FreedomWorks Chief Economist Wayne Brough has an excellent piece up on freedomworks.org about the farm bill fiasco being debated in Congress this week. I met with Rep. Jeff Flake’s staff earlier this week and will be participating in a conference call with the White House to strategize about how to make sure this disgraceful farm bill doesn’t see the light of day.

Here is an excerpt from Dr. Brough’s piece.

Despite a record $175.5 billion in crop production, with the price of all major crops continuing to rise, Congress is seeking to expand subsidies for farmers. In fact, the bill now pending in Congress would allow married couples with an adjusted gross income of $1.5 million to receive subsidies from the government, and even individuals who are not full-time farmers would be eligible for subsidies with an adjusted gross income of $500,000! The White House has suggested a lower cap of $200,000, which is still more than four times the median household income in the United States.