Farmers at the trough

The “present program for readjusting productive acreage to market requirements is admittedly but a temporary method of dealing with an emergency,” explained the U.S. secretary of agriculture. “It could not be relied upon as a permanent means to keeping farm production in line with market requirements.”

Taxpayers might be happy to learn the federal government has no intention of continuing to block the import of less expensive sugar, wool, honey, rice, peanuts and cotton (just to cite a few examples) — no intention, that is, of guaranteeing higher domestic grocery prices while helping keep Dominican sugar growers and African peanut farmers in abysmal poverty through the simple expedients of punitive tariffs and quotas, while spending billions of our own tax dollars per year subsidizing the incomes of inefficient domestic producers via farm subsidies and price supports.

They might be reassured, that is, until they learned this assurance came from Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace … in 1934.

In the intervening 73 years, federal farm policy has continued to be based on happy myths of small family farmers needing just a little help to make ends meet as they and their young’uns gather in the last of the pole beans from the back 40.

In fact, it turns out former NBA star Scottie Pippen received $78,945 in Agriculture Department “conservation subsidies” between 2003 and 2005 for land he controls in Arkansas. Texas oil billionaire Lee M. Bass qualified to receive $242,787 in subsidies during the same period. Washington uber-lobbyist Gerald Cassidy got $10,540 for maintaining a portion of his Dorchester County, Md., farm as wetlands.

None of those characters has ever been spotted wielding a plow or a hoe.

Where it used to be necessary to sift through a complex web of front corporations and other business screens to come up with names and numbers like those, Congress has now ordered the USDA to assign specific dollar amounts to the individuals behind those businesses.

That new data was then obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Environmental Working Group, which proceeded to compile the data and post it online.

The database includes about 358,000 beneficiaries who received $9.8 billion in crop subsidy benefits between 2003 and 2005. And even Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, admits the wider access to this new data could affect farm bill negotiations this year. “It’s going to be harder than ever before to defend the status quo,” Sen. Harkin says.

The current farm bill, which expires Sept. 30, limits farmers to $360,000 in subsidies per year. But The Associated Press reports, “That ceiling is filled with loopholes that allow many farms to exceed it.”

The Bush administration has proposed halting subsidies to anyone making more than $200,000 in adjusted gross income. Last month, Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced legislation that would cap individual farm payments at $250,000.

But this is all merely for the sake of appearance — arbitrary ceilings that only invite the lawyers and investment bankers to go to work carving new shelters.

The underlying question is why we need to continue a massive federal bailout that has been striving since 1919 to maintain an (inflation adjusted) artificial price structure that developed when the wheat fields of Europe were taken out of production and America was expected to “feed the world” because there was a little war on.

Starting in 1996, under the much-defamed Gingrich Congress, American farmers got whopping big extra payments under a farm bill that was supposed to finally “wean” them from ongoing subsidies. They took the money — and then shrieked like Paris Hilton being dragged off to jail when they were told their subsidies might really, really be cut back.

Paris is in jail now. But the farmers are back in deep clover.

So who’s really the spoiled brat?