Reaping What You Sow
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
July 10, 2007

What you need to know about the current wasteful farm subsidy system can be summed up as follows:

• Large farms, with 10 times the wealth of the average American family, receive most of the payments.
  
  
• The richest 10% of "farmers" receive almost three-quarters of the subsidies. Paul Allen - a Microsoft co-founder and the fifth-richest American, according to Forbes - got a subsidy. So did Texas oilman and billionaire Lee Bass.

These facts, courtesy of the non-profit organizations Citizens Against Government Waste and Environmental Working Group, show how Congress chose to waste your money in 2002 when a farm bill was last up for consideration.

Worse, there is a very good chance that lawmakers won't do anything about this flimflam in the new farm bill, which will likely come to the floor next week.

They should, of course, and a great place to start would be Rep. Ron Kind's Farm 21 proposal, which would put the brakes on this runaway gravy train.

Kind, a Wisconsin Democrat, and his co-sponsors, including Wisconsin Republican Reps. Paul Ryan and Tom Petri and Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, want to set up "risk management accounts" to take the place of subsidies. Farmers could draw on the accounts during hard times.

Backers say such a system could save $55 billion over a decade compared with the current colossus. The savings would be diverted to a voluntary conservation program, to federal nutrition efforts and to other programs. The bill would replace the current Milk Income Loss Contract program with similar accounts for dairy farmers.

The current system must be changed. It does almost nothing to help small farmers, it hurts consumers by needlessly boosting prices on a variety of products and it was a key reason that the effort to reach a global trade deal fell apart last year.

Unfortunately, there are signs that the leaders of this discussion - Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) - like things pretty much how they are.

Kind says he wants to work through the committee system to accomplish his goals, and we wish him luck. But he'll probably have to fight for his ideas on the floor, something he has vowed to do.

Congress has a chance to create a saner system that will truly support farmers and at the same time save taxpayers billions of dollars. What's not to like about that?