Taxpayers for Common Sense: New farm bill, same as old

TK; Not much traction for sweeping farm bill reform in the House, but the fresh produce industry appreciates the substantial changes in mandatory funding for their priorities. It's not so much if it is $1 billion or $3 billion, but a baseline is there. Taxpayers for Common Sense disagree:


Washington, D.C. – The following is a statement from Ms. Ryan Alexander, President, Taxpayers for Common Sense, on passage of H.R. 2419, The Farm, Nutrition, and Bioenergy Act of 2007.
Meet the new Farm Bill, same as the old Farm Bill. Today, the House forced through a Farm Bill that retains a hefty safety net for millionaire farmers.

Corporate agribusiness special interests will be celebrating the bill’s passage, which guarantees buckets of money to farmers who don’t need it, while taxpayers across the country get the slop bucket once again.

What Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) refers to as “a landmark achievement” is a carbon copy of the 2002 DeLay-Combest corporate farm bill that suckered taxpayers to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year. Multi-millionaire “farmers” living in the heart of San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, D.C. will continue to receive government handouts and insurance companies will continue to get hundreds of millions of dollars in profits directly from Uncle Sam courtesy of this legislation.

Chairman Collin Peterson’s (D-MN) “landmark farm bill” continues to promote protectionism, over-production, and market interference.

It’s a shame that the new Congress sent to reform Washington couldn’t even pass legislation to cut off the subsidy spigot for millionaires.