More of this, please
Mar 13th, 2007 at 8:14 am by PSoTD
The first step to talking about farm subsidies is to learn who gets the money and how much they get, and what America gets out of the deal.
Ross Hirschfeld says folks have been talking behind his back ever since the local paper reported that he has been getting millions of dollars in farm subsidies from Washington.
Hirschfeld, a hands-on farmer who shovels hog manure on Saturdays, just as he has since grade school, says that fellow farmers get angry at him now when he buys land to expand. He says his daughter, who teaches school 300 miles away, has been asked by her grade-school students about her “rich father.”
“People think, ‘They got all that money,’ blah, blah, blah,” Hirschfeld says.
Exactly how much Hirschfeld and other farmers get from Uncle Sam has become common knowledge around here because an environmental group has been posting names and figures on its Web site as part of its campaign against the nation’s multibillion-dollar farm-subsidy program.
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Under programs first created in the 1930s to stabilize farm income and prices, U.S. farmers got some $20 billion in subsidies in 2005, the last year for which figures are available. Most payments go to growers of five major crops - corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and cotton.
The Hirschfeld family - Hirschfeld, his brothers and his son - received $2.64 million from 1995 to 2005. The Hirschfelds farm mostly corn on a 5,000-acre spread near York and are among the top subsidy recipients in Nebraska’s 3rd Congressional District. It surpassed all districts in the nation in 2005 with $992 million in subsidies.
Corn prices are near record highs because of demand for ethanol and we are still paying subsidies? This is everything that is wrong with government programs and why we need someone to just gut the federal budget to the bare bones. Not the bare bones as defined by anyone of either party currently in power.