Guys no matter how we try to justify this if you are taking money from the government, it cost Americans in tax dollars.
Some one else is footing the bill.
U.S. Farm Subsidies, 1995 through 2003
As we near the end of the costliest decade in the 70-year history of government farm subsidies, a new update to the Environmental Working Group's farm subsidy database finds that taxpayers have spent more than $131 billion on federal farm programs over the past nine years. The total includes $16.4 billion spent during 2003, the fourth highest amount over the nine years and a 27 percent increase over 2002. Surges in disaster payments and commodity subsidies drove the increase, along with a modest expansion in conservation spending (see U.S. subsidy summary).
To put this expenditure in perspective, for the money taxpayers have provided in commodity and disaster subsidies alone over this period (88 percent of the total), not counting $16 billion in conservation payments, we could have bought 25 percent or more of all the farms in 302 counties--land, barns, farmhouses and all. In 47 counties where agriculture exists almost purely by the grace of government, taxpayers could have bought outright half the farms or more for the money we've spent in just the past nine years.
It's not as if the subsidies are 'saving the family farm.' Of the 2,128,982 farms enumerated by the most recent Census of Agriculture, for 2002, only 33 percent received government payments. Two-thirds of the nation's farmers get no subsidy payments whatsoever. For the most part they don't qualify because they grow the 'wrong' things. If you want to see what the wrong things are, stroll through the produce aisle or meat department of your local supermarket. The farmers who produce most of America's food do so without a check from taxpayers.
As the Farm Subsidy Database has documented in the past, the vast majority of the farmers who do receive government subsidy checks get minimal amounts of money. Eighty percent of the recipients between 1995 and 2003 received, on average, $6,918 for the entire period (see table on payment concentration). That comes to $768 a year, just over sixty-five bucks a month. Not much to run a family farm on—though in aggregate, the 2.4 million recipients in this category ended up taking almost $17 billion from taxpayers over 9 years.
Corn subsidies are a good example of the farm subsidy pyramid. In area, corn is the most important crop grown in this country--some 78 million acres have been planted in recent years--and no USDA subsidy program sends taxpayer money to more recipients. Between 1995 and 2003, government records show, 1,438,423 individual farmers, partnerships, corporations, estates and other entities received at least one corn subsidy payment. Yet 80 percent of them collected, on average, just over $4,700 total over the 9 years (see EWG's payment concentration analysis for corn). That's about $529 per year. No American family farm--no business, for that matter--is materially assisted by payments of less than $50 a month. Yet because there are 1.15 million subsidy beneficiaries in this category (the bottom-most 20 percent of recipients), taxpayers paid them $5.5 billion, about 15 percent of total corn subsidies.
The real action is at the top of the farm subsidy food chain, where 10 percent of the recipients—just over 305,023 individuals, partnerships, corporations, estates and myriad other entities—took in 72 percent of the total payments taxpayers provided for conservation, commodity and disaster programs over the 9 years. (That's an upward tick of 1 percent in concentration for the top 10 percent over the eight-year analysis EWG presented last year.) They collected, on average, $309,823 each, roughly $34,000 annually. The elite in this world of government dependency collected even more. The top four percent of recipients, for instance, number just over 122,000. Yet they cost taxpayers about $65 billion over 9 years, which works out to an average of $529,000, or nearly $59,000 per year.
What makes that particular number memorable is that it is almost exactly what the average American household earned in 2003. The average farm household is a different matter. They made significantly more, nearly $10,000 more (16 percent), averaging $68,605. To compound the irony of subsidies as family farm safety net, almost all of the income for the average farm household, 89 percent, came from off-farm sources, the jobs in town or elsewhere that make farm living pencil out for most Americans. It's not just that government subsidies aren't saving the family farm. Not even farming is.
The two categories of subsidies that ostensibly are available to all farmers, even if they grow the 'wrong' things, are conservation programs and disaster aid. While both categories increased in 2003 compared to 2002—disaster aid most strikingly—a different set of inequities plague these forms of assistance (go here for a subsidy summary by year and category).
The public hears a lot of soothing, bi-partisan talk about the vital importance of conservation and protecting the environment whenever it's time to move an ungainly farm subsidy bill through the body politic. But once the flow of commodity payments has been locked in, Congress proceeds in the out years to cut funds from the very conservation programs that provide broader, public interest cover when subsidy bills are under fire. As a consequence, far more farmers perennially apply for conservation programs than existing funds can serve. This "conservation backlog," recently documented by Environmental Defense, is of course made worse when Congress, with the tacit approval of the subsidy lobby, cuts conservation spending instead of commodity programs. In the current fiscal year, for instance, Congress slashed conservation program funds by nearly a half-billion dollars in the omnibus spending measure. Congress also cut $1.9 billion from conservation accounts earlier this fall in order to pay for farm disaster aid.
