Working on this magazine article about the farm bill is, once I've learned how to put the acronym soup in proper perspective, an eye-opening exercise in understanding why the federal government is in such stratospheric debt.
The House and Senate respectively have approved their versions of the bill, but it's not moving forward right now, because there's some talk afoot about scrapping that and going to an extension of the bill from the last five-year cycle.
I probably should have known to start my research with the Heritage Foundation rather than the more in-the-weeds analysis of the ag-econ think tanks. Heritage's Emily Goff makes clear that the new way of compensating farmers for loss is a marked departure from the decades-old model of paying them no matter how much they produce. (Because I was just getting a bunch of charts and tables and acronyms from the university-related sources, I wasn't able to graps this.) Still it's insufficient and ought to be scrapped as well. Its various provisions wind up doing nothing to extricate government from the farming sector, or reduce the cost thereof. We're still distorting the actual value of a whole lot of crops.
What I am struck by is that what we righties decry about FHer-care has been going on for years in agriculture. It's astounding to think that government has been paying most of farmers' crop-insurance premiums. Wish I could get the federal Santa Claus to pay my car insurance bill every month.
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