Good afternoon, Dave, > 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.
Point taken. However, does the parts of the Bush budget that you were complaining about have anything to do with this? In other words, the main cause of families losing their farms may be a lack of State right-to-farm laws but does that mean that the effect that Lowry is talking about does not exist? And if Bush were to follow the "perfect" policy (in your mind) could he do anything more than use his bully pulpit to try to get more States to pass "right-to-farm" laws? > 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. OK. Seems like you've made an even more powerful case *FOR* more of what Bush is apparently trying to do. So which is it? Are you against this part of the proposed budget because it cuts too much (which I thought you were saying in an earlier post) or because it cuts too little (which it appears you are saying above)? > 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. Uhm. What success? Now I'm really confused. Do we want higher prices for farmers (the rationale for the program) or do we want lower prices for consumers (the apparent result of the program) or are we really libertarians who want prices to find their own level? I would also note that the lower prices may simply be a result of the world market production swamping US attempts to restrict production and boost prices. A more effective strategy might be to go spray something on the crops in Canada and Australia. But that might be unneighborly. :-) > > 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. And those are probably pretty close to the fixed costs of running a medium family farm in the Palouse, too. Right? > > 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. If that was true, then we should have already hit that point. Remember, Rockefeller's Standard Oil never owned an oil well. (OK, maybe they did, occasionally.) Rockefeller's genius was to recognize that the value came from getting the oil from the well to the consumer. He set up the transportation network and everyone on both sides hated, feared, and needed him. The people who owned oil wells would beg him to extend his pipeline to their well. The people who bought the various finished products (kerosene, etc.) had to pay whatever price he demanded. It would be the same thing with food distribution, if anyone ever got a distribution monopoly--and it wouldn't make a whit of difference whether the folks doing the farming were "family farms" or "corporate farms". Whoever farmed would be begging THE DISTRIBUTOR to accept their produce and whoever bought would be begging THE DISTRIBUTOR to bring stuff their way. But it's not like that (sturm und drung about Wal-Mart notwithstanding) and the chances of it happening are virtually nil--especially with the antitrust laws we still have on the books (and which are getting enforced for ever smaller and more niche-filling "monopolies." Of course, just as small boutique specialty shops still survive in the age of Wal-Mart, Costco, Albertson's, Kroger, Safeway, et. al., we would see (and I would suggest, are seeing) small boutique "family farms" that find a way to survive as well. And chances are that subsidies only distort things in favor of the "corporate farms" rather than the "family farms." > > 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. When the total "package" of cuts is 20 Billion in a 2.X Trillion budget, I think it's safe to say that there probably isn't a whole lot going on. I'm still waiting for the details on what's involved before I make a final judgment, however. Lowell C. Savage It's the freedom, stupid! Gun control: tyrants' tool, fools' folly. _______________________________________________ Libnw mailing list [email protected] List info and subscriber options: http://immosys.com/mailman/listinfo/libnw Archives: http://immosys.com/mailman//pipermail/libnw
