WASHINGTON, April 5 (UPI) -- Experts at both liberal and conservative think tanks are observing that the main beneficiaries of a possible ten-year appropriation for farm subsidies will be vote-collecting Congressmen and wealthy individuals, as has typically been the case with similar legislation in the past.
Think tank scholars on the right and the left oppose the current crop subsidy regime, but for different reasons. Conservative and libertarian thinkers believe the subsidies are another example of wasteful government spending and fly in the face of basic economic principles. Liberal analysts, however, oppose the crop subsidies because financial awards are unequally distributed and encourage poor environmental practices.
The current bill, S. 1731, will compensate farmers a total of $171 billion over 10 years, for the difference between the market value they receive for their crops and the amount of the federally-suggested price, which is usually higher.
However, Brian Riedl, an economic policy fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation of Washington, and author of a recent report on the bill, says recent calculations by the Congressional Budget Office reveal that the total cost of the bill will be $6 billion higher. When future supplements are factored in, he says, it is possible for the bill's final cost to be nearly twice as high, almost $350 billion.
This is because there is precedent for Congress to increase the cost of government programs -- especially farm bills -- after they've been passed, Riedl says.
"As far back as the 1970s and 1980s, farm bills spent on average 78 percent more than their projected levels," he writes in his policy brief. "The 1990 farm bill underestimated farm spending between 1990 and 1996 by 33 percent. Despite this pattern of underestimations, however, Congress naively accepted the projection that the 1996 farm bill would cost $47 billion. (But it) ultimately cost $123 billion."
The current bill is just another example of pork barrel politics during an election year, according to Chris Edwards, director of fiscal policy at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington.
Edwards says the legislation is a complete turnaround of the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996, in which the Republican-controlled Congress announced its decision to phase-out subsidies. Many of the same legislators that voted for the Freedom to Farm Act are still present on Capitol Hill, but are not voicing their philosophical convictions out of fear that they will not get reelected, Edwards says.
"The Republicans in Congress now are a totally different breed than the Republicans in Congress were six years ago," he says. "There were very few efforts at reform this year other than Sen. Dick Lugar (R- Ind.) being an outspoken person in favor of reform, but he has really been a voice in the wilderness. It is kind of sad really that there is no effort to reform this year."
Legislators are not embracing reform, but instead they are backtracking on the reform that was agreed upon six years ago, Riedl says.
In addition, Riedl says members of Congress are purposely not seeking advice from the think tank and policy community on the farm bill, as they usually do on other bills.
"Unfortunately, sound public policy does not seem to be a priority among legislators," Riedl says. "Farm policy is an issue where a legislator needs to get reelected. When you have issues that are reelection issues, what think tanks say is good public policy doesn't even matter anymore. They just want to know what will get them reelected and farm policy definitely falls in that category."
Riedl notes that while politicians believe the farm bill is crucial to their campaigns, significantly increasing expenditures does not necessarily mean electoral success.
The Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based liberal think tank, opposes the farm subsidy program as it now stands, but is not necessarily opposed to the idea of subsidies, according to Susanne Fleek, director of governmental relations EWG.
"Our position is that given the amount of money, this bill should help the most amount of farmers possible, to distribute the money within states more equitably and also to distribute the money across all of the states more equitably," she says.
The current system favors farmers who cultivate large areas of crops. The fact that 10 percent of the individuals who receive subsidies get more than two-thirds of the total compensation is cited as an example of an unfair distribution system.
Since many farmers who operate a modest amount of acreage are not able to receive subsidies, most of the compensation goes to agribusinesses and wealthy individuals. EWG keeps a national database of the recipients of subsidies, and it is not unusual to find media billionaire Ted Turner, investment billionaire Charles Schwab, and multimillionaire pro basketball star Scottie Pippin on the list of people who receive subsidies.
As a result, an unintended consequence of the bill is that it favors the consolidation of smaller farms into larger ones, often turning family farms into tenants of much larger
corporations, Riedl says.
