Star Tribune Editorial
Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5651698.html
Farm subsidies
A Fair plan for saving money
Congress faces any number of difficult choices this fall as lawmakers struggle to tame a big federal budget deficit while paying the bills from Hurricane Katrina. But Minnesota Sens. Mark Dayton and Norm Coleman face an easy choice on Thursday when the Senate Agriculture Committee could take up a plan to cap federal crop subsidies available to individual farmers. The payment limits would
save money for taxpayers, introduce a new element of fairness to the federal farm program, and conserve money needed for more urgent federal priorities.
Dayton recently embraced the concept, and Coleman's staff says he is considering it.
The plan -- which would cap federal crop subsidies at $250,000 per farmer -- is not popular with Agriculture Committee Chairman Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., and he is not expected to include it in the draft budget bill he presents to the committee.
But the idea has bipartisan authorship -- Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota -- and support from a remarkable coalition that stretches from the Land Stewardship Project to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. It would furnish at least $1 billion of the $3 billion in savings that the Agriculture Committee is required to produce under
this year's tough congressional budget resolution. It also would avert destructive cuts to other parts of the federal farm program that produce a greater public benefit, such as soil conservation and a basic rural safety net.
The argument against caps seems to be that federal subsidies should grow with the size of a farming operation, and, in today's agriculture, some operations have hundreds of thousands of dollars at risk each year. But farms of that size are really small corporations; they should be have the financial resources and business acumen to manage their risk the way other small businesses do. Besides,
it's impossible to justify payouts as high as $1 million to large farms when Congress is simultaneously planning cuts to food and nutrition programs for impoverished families who receive as little as $3 a day from the government.
Of course any cut to farm payments is painful for farm-state senators. But if the Agriculture Committee rejects this one, the next round of cuts will be more painful yet.
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