A new shade of lipstick for the pig

There’s a new plan to wean all the nation’s heroin addicts off their favorite form of dope.

Under this plan, Congress will provide the addicts with free heroin for five years — far more heroin than they’ve been getting in the past, of guaranteed strength and purity, hassle-free.

In exchange, the addicts promise to go cold turkey when the five years are up — really, really promise, cross their hearts and hope to die.

If you think this sounds like an idea with a good chance of success, you would have loved the attempt by congressional Republicans, back in the 1990s, to wean America’s farmers from their 70-year federal subsidy and price-support habit.

Farmers happily took the big payoffs they were offered — swearing up and down they understood this was to cushion the blow of the coming “cold turkey” price-support withdrawal — and then marched right back to Washington in 2002 and successfully demanded that the whole mess be reinstated.

Now — that particular five-year plan having run its course — Congress is hunkering down to “reform” the farm bill once again.

The main goal? To silence critics who complain absentee multi-millionaires are drawing subsidies and tax breaks by investing in agricultural operations and then claiming to be “struggling farmers.”

It’s so embarrassing.

The solution?

Where farmers whose incomes exceed $2.5 million a year are now supposedly disqualified from collecting federal subsidies, the House Agriculture Committee voted Wednesday to ban federal subsidies to farmers with incomes averaging more than $1 million a year, and to stop farmers from collecting payments for multiple farm businesses.

The administration had proposed limiting payments to farmers if they earn an average of more than $200,000 a year.

How is that averaged? Gross or taxable? How is equipment depreciation counted? Can a father and two sons split a $2.5 million operation to make each of them “poor enough”? If we style her hair and freshen up her lipstick, THEN will you take this 600-pound sow to the box social?

The goal of the farm bill is to make sure food prices stay high for consumers by involving Washington in complex schemes to buy and store surplus produce (rather than let it drive prices down), or to pay farmers to destroy food (“undersized” fruit, for instance) or to simply grow less in the first place.

It would be hard to imagine a weirder and more complex scheme, especially when one considers it’s designed to make sure the average voter and taxpayer pays more — not less — for his groceries.

Nearly $18 billion in tax money was spent on these programs last year. (That’s “billions.”) Sponsors of this year’s reforms say they might save taxpayers about $45 million per year. (That’s “millions.” And if you think that means next year’s bill for farm supports will be $45 million less than this year’s, please get back on the turnip truck.)

Some radicals continue to press for weaning farmers off subsidies altogether. They point out the current “compromise” does not address demands from nations in the World Trade Organization for drastic cuts in the U.S. subsidies — conflict over the issue led to the collapse of World Trade Organization talks last summer — and threats that a failure to make those real reforms could bring punitive tariffs on U.S. exports.

(The WTO, in a case brought by Brazil, has already ruled some American cotton subsidies to be illegal. Canada is also pursuing a complaint against U.S. corn subsidies.)

The current scheme “will do very little to make our agriculture policies more equitable, will not address the real challenges we face at the WTO, and it will not do anything to help our farmers produce for the market rather than for the government paycheck,” explains Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis.

Rep. Kind has written an alternative that would replace subsidies with government subsidized savings accounts. Farmers could use them to cover losses when crop prices are low or yields are poor.

Ah. Whereupon they’d go “cold turkey” … right?

The savings accounts would be fine — if they really replaced the subsidies. But the best solution to the pending expiration of the farm bill would be to let it expire and pop champagne corks — a sort of national version of a mortgage-burning party.

But that, of course, is the one approach now considered unthinkable by the folks in charge in Washington.

Instead, the new shade of lipstick on the pig is the best we’re likely to get,.