Saturday, July 15, 2006
Editorial: A bumper crop of waste and abuse
As chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte can weed suburbanites from farm subsidy programs.
From the RoundTable blog
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"Billions will be paid to people who are not entitled to these benefits under the law and billions more to people who many Americans do not think need or should be entitled to them."
-- Rep. Bob Goodlate
That's what Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, said last year when he was justifying why the House Agriculture Committee that he chairs planned to make deep cuts to the food stamp program.
But he just as easily could have been talking about the billions of dollars in farm subsidies paid to rich landowners who come no closer to farming than owning a lawn tractor. Or he could have been talking about the $3.8 billion wasted last year paying farmers for low crop prices when they actually sold their crops at substantial profits.
But he wasn't. It was those despicable people claiming they were too poor to buy food who were abusing the system a hundred dollars at a time. Meanwhile a Houston heart surgeon cashed $490,709 worth of farm subsidy checks for land that hasn't been farmed in at least a decade -- all on the up and up. He's entitled.
Food stamp recipients are easy targets; they hardly have the clout to lobby Congress, unlike the agriculture industry that in just the last six months of 2005 dropped $40 million while lobbying the legislative and executive branches, according to Political Money Line.
This is the same time period that Goodlatte's committee hunted down waste, fraud and abuse from a program that keeps the poorest Americans from starving, while pledging to "protect all agriculture programs from cuts that would change the fundamental structure or operations of these programs."
That would be programs, such as the ones uncovered by a Washington Post investigation, that paid $1.3 billion in crop subsidies to people who do no farming at all and that cut billions of dollars worth of checks to prop up farmers' income even when they sold their crops at high prices.
Ironically, both programs were created to address waste, fraud and abuse and were meant to wean farmers off the public dole. Instead, the 2002 farm bill fertilized even more unjustified spending.
Goodlatte and his committee are at work now on shaping the 2007 farm bill. They need to stop paying billions of dollars to people who do not need nor should be entitled to payments, like those who buy big houses in a new subdivision and collect farm payments on their back yards.
