…that even the Strib, which has never met a spending program it doesn’t like, gets it:
A number of members of Congress have celebrated this week’s passage of the $290 billion farm bill as a great victory for bipartisanship in Washington.
Proof, if any were needed, of the dangers of “bipartisanship” on any issue that doesn’t start with Pearl Harbor being bombed.
If this is what bipartisanship looks like, maybe we should hope for a return to gridlock.
I’m going to bronze that paragraph.
The Bush administration initially took the right stand, proposing to eliminate any subsidy payments for farmers who make more than $200,000 in annual gross income. It later indicated that it could live with a $500,000 limit. However, the bill passed by the House and Senate embraces farm incomes of up to $750,000 and nonfarm income of $500,000 for individuals…A majority of House Republicans broke from the White House despite the president’s veto threat, and the Senate passed the bill Thursday in an 81-15 vote, making an override certain. That a veto-proof majority in both houses supported the bill is testament to the power of the agricultural lobby, especially in an election year.
It’s testament, also, to how the ag lobby makes people lose their minds – how it can make Norm Coleman sound more like Amy Klobuchar than Jim Ramstad does; how it can make the conservatives on the Plains keep electing the likes of Byron Dorgan and Tom Daschle and Kent Conrad and John Tester to Congress.
Finally, it’s proof that the national GOP has lost its roots. If they can’t hold the line on a pork barrel farm bill in a season where the ag industry is doing better than it has in my lifetime (half of which was spent in farm country, much of that spent in ag-focused news media), when can they?
I hate subsidies as much as the next guy and if that were the sole basis for objecting, then dollar limits would make no difference – it’s all bad.
But the story as reported isn’t about that, it’s about the dollar limits being too high; unfortunately, the story doesn’t give me enough information to know how bad this deal is.
To an individual wage earner, Gross Income and Net Income aren’t that far apart. But to a business, they can be wildly different.
Suppose I buy widgets for 90 cents apiece and sell them for a dollar. I sell 200,000 widgets so my Gross Income is $200,000 – I’m rich! But after you subtract out the cost of the widgets, my Net Income is only $20,000 – crap, I’m poor again.
I don’t know enough to know whether farmers typically make exactly 10 percent profit on the products they sell, or more, or less. I can’t tell you whether the ordinary family farmer (the people the program is intended to protect) sells 200,000 units, or more, or less. Without more information, I can’t tell if $200,000 is where Ordinary Joe Blow ends and Archer Daniels Midland begins.
So it’s a big number. Means nothing – I know lots of small businesses that gross well over a quarter million, but the employees and shareholders aren’t living in clover.
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nate, my guess is that gross farm sales does not equal gross income per the Farm Bill. Most likely, the gross income on the farm bill looks at the income generated from the business (sales-expenses) and other sources of income (other household member’s jobs, interest income, etc.). Essentially, I would imagine the farm bill’s gross income equals the gross income on one’s federal tax return prior to any deductions. Poorly explained but I hope that makes sense…one too many Boddingtons last night is making my brain fuzzy.
What an amazing lobby they have eh? Subsidies when prices are low, and subsidies when prices are high!