{"id":9925,"date":"2016-12-11T17:04:48","date_gmt":"2016-12-11T22:04:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=9925"},"modified":"2024-09-11T17:17:39","modified_gmt":"2024-09-11T21:17:39","slug":"wall-st-journal-living-off-the-fat-of-washington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/11\/wall-st-journal-living-off-the-fat-of-washington\/","title":{"rendered":"Wall St. Journal: Living Off the Fat of Washington"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><strong>Wall Street Journal<\/strong>, December 12, 2016<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/living-off-the-fat-of-washington-1481491337\">Living Off the Fat of Washington<\/a><\/h2>\n<p>If Trump is going to \u2018drain the swamp,\u2019 he might start with wasteful ag subsidies.<\/p>\n<p>By James Bovard<\/p>\n<p><strong>President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s vow to \u201cdrain the swamp\u201d in Washington could begin with the Agriculture Department<\/strong>. Federal aid to farmers is forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to soar to $19 billion in 2017. Farmers will receive twice as much of their income from handouts (25%) this year as they did in 2013, according to the USDA. Whoever Mr. Trump names as his agriculture secretary should target wasteful farm programs for spending cuts.<\/p>\n<p>Here are a few of the most egregious examples:<\/p>\n<p>\u2022 Cotton. Incredibly, the U.S. government has paid $750 million to subsidize Brazilian cotton production since 2010. This is the result of a 2002 World Trade Organization complaint brought by the Brazilian government claiming that the U.S. unfairly subsidized cotton producers and depressed world cotton prices. The WTO justifiably ruled against the United States. To deter Brazil from imposing penalty tariffs on U.S. exports, the U.S. paid a king\u2019s ransom to Brazil so it could perpetuate handouts to American farmers.<\/p>\n<p>The federal cotton program was revised in 2014, but farmers continue reaping roughly $1.5 billion a year in aid\u2014more than 40% of the market value of U.S. cotton production, according to a 2015 study by the International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development. The same study estimated that the U.S. program suppresses world cotton prices by up to 7%, costing foreign cotton growers up to $3 billion a year.<\/p>\n<p>\u2022 Sugar. The U.S. maintains a regime of import quotas and price supports that drive U.S. sugar prices to double or triple the world price. Since 1997 Washington\u2019s sugar policy has zapped more than 120,000 U.S. jobs in food manufacturing, according to a 2013 study by Agralytica. More than 10 jobs have been lost in manufacturing for every remaining sugar grower in the U.S.<\/p>\n<p>\u2022 Peanuts. In 2002 Congress abolished the quota system that required farmers to possess a federal license to grow peanuts. Yet rather than trust free markets, Congress created a new price-support program. In 2014 Congress sharply increased peanut subsidies. Federal peanut outlays are forecast by the USDA to increase eightfold between 2015 and 2017, reaching almost $1 billion a year. As a result, the USDA is drowning in a sea of surplus peanuts that farmers dump on the government.<\/p>\n<p>\u2022 Insurance. The five-year farm bill Congress enacted in 2014 replaced some direct payments to farmers with an array of so-called insurance programs. But this isn\u2019t the type of insurance homeowners buy to protect against unforeseen, catastrophic risks. Instead, \u201cinsurance\u201d was simply a name to continue the sludge of handouts under a new guise, providing farmers with higher prices than markets provided. The CBO estimates that crop insurance subsidies will cost taxpayers $7.5 billion next year.<\/p>\n<p>\u2022 Marketing. Farm subsidies are slopped out for anything vaguely related to agriculture. The USDA\u2019s Market Access Program, or MAP, distributes $176 million each year to underwrite foreign advertisements and promotions for favored U.S. businesses, including pet-food producers and winemakers. The program is such an obvious boondoggle that even the Obama administration sought to cut it, stating in 2010 that its \u201ceconomic impact is unclear and it does not serve a clear need.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>While generous government subsidies are defended by invoking the \u201cfamily farmer,\u201d big farmers snare the vast majority of federal handouts. According to a report released this year by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based nonprofit research organization, \u201cthe top 1 percent of farm subsidy recipients received 26 percent of subsidy payments between 1995 and 2014.\u201d The group\u2019s analysis of government farm-subsidy data also found that the \u201ctop 20 percent of subsidy recipients received 91 percent of all subsidy payments.\u201d Fifty members of the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans have received farm subsidies, according to the group, including David Rockefeller Sr. and\u00a0 Charles Schwab.<\/p>\n<p>Even without federal subsidies, the average U.S. farmer would be far more affluent than other Americans. According to the USDA, in 2015 the median farm household had a net worth of $827,307. That includes a great many residential, gentlemen and hobby farmers. The largest class of farmers\u2014those who produce most farm products and harvest the largest share of the subsidies\u2014have a median net worth of $2,586,000. By contrast, the median net worth for American households in 2013 was $81,200, according to the Federal Reserve.<\/p>\n<p>Farm subsidies will provide one of the clearest tests of whether Mr. Trump seeks fundamental change in Washington. It is time to stop pretending that agriculture is exempt from the laws of supply and demand.<strong> The only way to fix federal farm programs is to abolish them<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Mr. Bovard is the author of \u201cAttention Deficit Democracy\u201d (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2016 Living Off the Fat of Washington If Trump is going to \u2018drain the swamp,\u2019 he might start with wasteful ag subsidies. By James Bovard President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s vow to \u201cdrain the swamp\u201d in Washington could begin with the Agriculture Department. Federal aid to farmers is forecast by the Congressional [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[415,953,753,954,329,855,477,153,955],"class_list":["post-9925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boondoggle","tag-cotton","tag-donald-trump","tag-environmental-working-group","tag-farm-subsidies","tag-peanuts","tag-sugar","tag-usda","tag-world-trade-organization"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Wall St. Journal: Living Off the Fat of Washington - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Trump must drain the &quot;agricultural policy swamp.&quot; Farm subsidies are soaring - and the only way to fix farm programs is to abolish them.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/11\/wall-st-journal-living-off-the-fat-of-washington\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wall St. Journal: Living Off the Fat of Washington - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism &amp; Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9925"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9928,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9925\/revisions\/9928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}