According to a recent report from the Union for Concerned Scientists, industry interest groups have spent more than$ 400 million lobbying lawmakers on the 2024 farm bill. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the legislation introduced by House Republicans last year has received criticism from corporate-sponsored boondoggles from all political parties.
The$ href=”https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/17/exclusive-house-unveils-farm-bill-00158584″ target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>1.5 trillion act was debossed as a federal gift to supported special interests at a press conference on Tuesday by plan researchers from the Heritage Foundation, National Taxpayers Union, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and Environmental Working Group. Despite all the publicity Boeing and Northrop Grumman’s lavish spending on domestic issues to increase their home influence, agribusiness has already spent almost 20 % more than the security sector this year to win benefits from Washington power agents.
Josh Sewell, director of Citizens for Common Sense’s Research and Policy, criticizes the GOP land costs for including tens of billions of dollars in new incentives for agricultural specific interests.
” An practice to get more money, regardless of have,” Sewell said,” Drastically increasing government-imposed least grain prices to a degree that guarantees payments for many of these crops is a. ” More subsidies are not needed, especially as 70 percent of farmers do n’t even grow a commodity eligible”.
Around 10,000 repeat recipients of farm subsidies or disaster relief payments have collected more than$ 11 billion over the course of 39 years, according to an analysis from the Environmental Working Group ( EWG ) earlier this month. Regardless of earlier funding, farmers are still able to collect tax subsidies each year.
Some beneficiaries of subsidies who received payments for 39 consecutive years “never function or reside on farms,” according to EWG. In reality, 48 of the 10, 250 follow recipients live in the world’s 50 largest cities, despite a necessity that farm subsidy recipients been’ constantly engaged in farming,'” the group reported.
According to EWG Senior Vice President Scott Faber, the House Republican land costs had established commodity price levels so great that growers may receive additional taxpayer handouts for cotton, peanuts, and rice each year. When crop yields or incomes fall under guaranteed rates, producers are ready to collect payments from the national produce insurance plan.
According to Faber,” That would be as if the casino’s owners were creating slot machines that would pay off each time the mob pulled the handle.” A farm safety net that generates annual income is not a safety net. It’s a trampoline”.
In a nutshell, House Republican Agriculture Chairman Glenn “G T” Thompson discusses inflation as a cause of the increase in commodity price floors and thus subsidies. However, according to the Department of Agriculture’s forecast for this year, Bryan Riley of the National Taxpayers Union claimed on Tuesday that the chairman’s bill pursues the wrong remedy while farm equity and assets are at record highs despite the current economic environment.
The farm bill should address that by addressing concerns about input prices through measures that would reduce those input prices, Riley said. The farm bill as proposed, however, says nothing about rolling back tariffs on steel, fertilizer, aluminum, or lumber. There are more dollars being spent on export assistance programs, but nothing is going to encourage more trade agreements that open the market.
Therefore, Congress should address input prices head on by lowering costs for everyone, Riley continued. Not by increasing subsidies that will directly cost taxpayers to politically favored areas of the farm economy, which are currently in decline.
The bill was described as “one of the most common governmental responses to inflation and the worst governmental response to inflation,” according to David Ditch, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
Given the repercussions of charging higher prices to consumers, Ditch said, “taxpayers are going to be the ones who are going to be taking the biggest hit.”
Ditch warned that the spending increases will also create a new expectation for the upcoming farm bill hearing in another five years.
” So even though the cost will be in the tens of billions of dollars over the course of this farm bill, it could easily reach the hundreds of billions of dollars in decades to come,” Ditch said.
