My second proposed area to cut the Federal budget is farm subsidies. The Department of Agriculture will spend $142 billion in 2010, or about $1,200 for every U.S. household. It operates 237 different subsidy programs and employs 96,000 workers in about 7,000 offices across the nation. It oversees more than 10,700 pages of regulations. Some of this is probably useful, but the farm subsidies, totaling these days about $30 billion a year, are clearly not useful. To begin with, most of these payments don't go to struggling small family farmers, as politicians like to pretend. Most of the payments go to huge commercial farms. Here is the breakdown for a recent year:
In the second place, these subsidies have a distorting affect on the world market. Lots of farmers in poor counties are in trouble because US government-subsidized grains undercut their prices, making it impossible for them to make a living. If we really wanted more effective foreign aid to help those in poorer countries, the very first thing we would do would be to eliminate the farm subsidies which cause large commercial US farms to flood the world with under-priced grains.
So my second proposal for cutting the federal budget is to completely eliminate agricultural subsidies.
Posts
