Oh, wait - if you got the version the President got (and vetoed) then you haven't read the whole thing.
Having become a Gentleman Farmer (who am I kidding, SWWBO is the Gentlelady Farmer), living out among farmers and ranchers, and working with a few others who have some acres and agribusiness interests, I have been paying some attention to the Farm Bill. I'm bemused to find that if I *don't* do some things, the Farm of Argghhh! could pull in several thousand dollars per annum, for *not* doing things. Of course, that makes the Federal Government a lessee of my land, and gives them far more control over what I can and can't do than I am interested in allowing.
Mind you - they may have put a provision in there to make it worth my while to *do* something, because I might just be able to make more money for doing something, almost irrespective of the market, than I can for *not* doing something, other than owning land zoned agricultural. Hey, unlike most of the big winners in the Farm Bill, I at least *live* on my land, and not in Manhattan and Los Angeles, Dallas or Houston.
Heh. I've been talking with the farmers I know, and several of them, mostly ranchers, admittedly, though a few are crop-growers, and they were looking at the bill skeptically.
Heh. Not any more. But if you really care - click the Flash Traffic/Extended entry for the rest.
Around the water cooler and elsewhere, like Rotary - several of the bigger crop growers (vice the ranchers) were all agog over the ACRE program - which looks like a poster child for Possibly Good Idea with Huge Unintended Consequences. The conversation was the country-style version of this from the WashPo:
Then farmers got a look at the bill's formula for determining benefits under ACRE . It pegs the subsidies to current, record-high prices for grain, meaning farmers would get paid if prices fall back to their historical and, for farmers, perfectly profitable norms. A program that started out as a streamlined insurance policy against extraordinary hardship has mutated into a possible guarantee of extraordinary prosperity. Small wonder that, as The Post's Dan Morgan reports, a farming blog is urging farmers to sign up for ACRE, which it describes as "lucrative beyond expectations."The farm bill's defenders insist that a budgetary disaster will not come to pass, because grain prices will not come down much during the five years the bill will be in effect. "The program does not look excessively expensive for the lifetime of the farm bill," said Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte ( Va. ), the ranking Republican on the House Agriculture Committee. In other words, even if they don't have to pay extra for ACRE , Americans will have to pay higher food prices – so they may as well get used to it. None of the legislators who rushed to override President Bush's veto of the bill yesterday will have the decency to blush the next time they pontificate about fiscal responsibility. But we can only wonder what other expensive surprises still lurk within this profoundly wasteful legislation.
Yanno, as one of the congressional staffers I chatted with yesterday noted, "What you're seeing is an urban/rural divide." and that's certainly true.
And most of the farmers I've talked to are either late-in-life tyros like myself - but a few are lifelong farmers, and we all feel like this thing is just out of control, and been bashed and modified and added to, subtracted from, etc - that it's just a mess, and an expensive one, to boot.
My closing comment to the staffer was this: We gotta find a better way for you guys (meaning Congress in general, not just staffers) to do the business of hashing out the details in the bills so that they're clear and understandable. Maybe some Members should spend less time worrying about steroids in baseball and eavesdropping in football and take the time to *read*, analyze, and do the math on the more mundane matters that cost money, vice the glitz stuff better left to law enforcement. In other words, perhaps Congress should stick to it's knitting.
Oh, wait - clear and understandable. That's not likely to happen. Because with that would potentially come accountability, and that's not something most politicians, especially legislators, want too much of, for themselves. Lots and lots of it for the rest of us, though.
