Dept of Agriculture: a bloated bureacracy subsidizing the rich?

[futurebeachbum]

From the San Jose Mercury News op-ed "Opinion: Victor Davis Hanson: Tear down the bloated USDA bureaucracy"

The short of it is politics, not economics or need control which crops we subsidize and who gets the money. Big firms like ConAgra and others have it down to a (political) science and both the GOP and the Democrats are so in thrall to them that they cannot do away with the subsidies. Its a pretty good discussion. This budget also contains ethanol subsidies.

Here are a few bits from it (any emphasis is mine):

The Department of Agriculture no longer serves as a lifeline to millions of struggling homestead farmers. Instead, it is a vast, self-perpetuating postmodern bureaucracy with an amorphous budget of some $130 billion -- a sum far greater than the nation's net farm income this year. In fact, the more the Agriculture Department has pontificated about family farmers, the more they have vanished -- comprising now only about 1 percent of the American population.

This year it will give a record $20 billion in various crop "supports" to the nation's wealthiest farmers -- with the richest 10 percent receiving more than 70 percent of all the redistributive payouts. If farmers on their own are making handsome profits, why, with a $1.6 trillion annual federal deficit, is the Department of Agriculture borrowing unprecedented amounts to subsidize them?

Free-market conservatives don't dare touch the Department of Agriculture, given the senatorial clout of Midwest farm states and the mythology of the independent American yeoman farmer. Don't expect left-wing Democrats to object, either. In a brilliantly conceived devil's bargain, the Department of Agriculture gives welfare to the wealthy on the one hand, while on the other sending more than $70 billion to the lower-income brackets in food stamps.

The multilayered Department of Agriculture has no real mission, much less a methodology, other than to provide cash to congressional pet constituencies. Its vital functions such as crop reporting and forecasting, food inspection and scientific research are buried beneath politically driven cash transfers and could easily be farmed out to other agencies.

 

[idlewind]

Why can't we turn the food inspectors and crop reporting over to the Dept. of commerce and abolish the entire Dept.

 

[scooterbug44]

Why can't we limit any subsidy payments to farms of a certain size and income and limit food stamp usage to non-junk food?

Lots of room to make cuts at the Ag dept that would not hurt anyone who isn't a millionaire or billionaire.