Good evening, Lowell... Lowell C. Savage wrote:
> Here's a little different take on the farm aspect of Bush's proposal. > > http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200502080732.asp I'll take a bit of an overview of the article you just selected. QUOTE: Family farms aren't big enough to garner the largest subsidies and are squeezed by the way the federal payments increase land values and stimulate overproduction. "The subsidies reward the guy who gets higher yields with higher subsidies, and he's able to buy out his neighbor and get even bigger," says Dennis Avery, an agriculture expert at the Hudson Institute. Actually, neither statement is entirely true. However, what is brutally truthful about farming in the Midwest is that the incredibly rising prices in a hot real estate market is what is tearing down the American farming family. In a 2004 study that was done by The Successful Farming Magazine, it was discovered that three out of every four farms located within a five mile radius of urban areas were destined to end up in foreclosure or be sold for cash not because of bad farming practices or other irregularities, but because the taxes on the land and the valuation of the property were such that the farming families could not afford to farm. Nebraska is one of the few states that have a durable "right to farm" law on the books which prohibits expanding towns and cities from taxing farm lands on the same basis as urban lands. QUOTE: Ten percent of farms - i.e., the biggest ones - receive 60 percent of the subsidies. Actually, if you take the numbers provided to us by the Department of Agriculture, you'll see the break on subsidies are actually much *worse* than that. Of the agribusinesses who received the top 50% of all crop subsidies in the year 2004, less than 10% were "family farms", with the majority of all farm subsidy payments going to huge agribusiness corporations, each of which were responsible for making hefty donations to political parties. What we have in farm subsidies is a perfect fiscal recycling center: money goes out and comes right back in. ADDENDUM: Lowry's piece makes no mention of the type of subsidies here in Eastern Washington where farmers are paid during certain years NOT to raise a crop, such as barley or corn. Certain restrictions apply to these types of sudsidies, but not what you might think. Some within agriculture are of the opinion that this is a type of price support program, withholding grain inventories until the world price rises to an acceptable price. However, within the last decade, there have been incidents where not only did the system not work, the world price for grain actually *dropped*. It's hard to argue with success. > I would think that ANY libertarian would say that Bush doesn't go far > enough. It turns out that he is talking about limiting payments to > $250,000 > per farm. If only *I* could have that as my "only source of income." It would be different if your fixed costs of running the family farm averaged at the $163,201 per year of a small family farm in the Palouse. They're so hard up that during the grain harvest they inducted me into driving a Peterbilt back and forth to the docks in Lewiston because I worked cheap and knew the way around the scales. > farms. Of course, that still doesn't tell me why a family-run farm should > be any more sacred than the family-run grocery store. Well, if all the farms were run by corporate Amerikka, it wouldn't be long before the corporations would control ALL our food, from the dirt until the super market. Without any visible competition, the next subsidy you'd hear about would be for the American family that could no longer afford to buy food. > I suspect we'll find that the details of the "indigent/elderly" will, on > closer inspection, be a similar sort of deal--weeding out fraud and those > who don't need welfare. If you start weeding out the frauds from the indigent/elderly, pretty soon the government won't have anyplace to send those nice little subsidy checks except for a few hard-working farming families, now would they? Maybe something good will come out of Bush's budget cuts, after all. 8-) Dave -- Dave Laird ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) The Used Kharma Lot Web Page: http://www.kharma.net updated 11/24/2004 Usenet news server : news://news.kharma.net Fortune Random Thought For the Minute All this wheeling and dealing around, why, it isn't for money, it's for fun. Money's just the way we keep score. -- Henry Tyroon _______________________________________________ Libnw mailing list [email protected] List info and subscriber options: http://immosys.com/mailman/listinfo/libnw Archives: http://immosys.com/mailman//pipermail/libnw
