Investigative reports published in The Washington Post provide more information than you might want to know about farm subsidies. That knowledge can make you even more cynical about government inefficiency and citizen greed. People who own land that was once farmed get money from the government, sometimes thousands of hundreds of dollars. According to one of the articles,
What began in the 1930s as a limited safety net for working farmers has swollen into a far-flung infrastructure of entitlements that has cost $172 billion over the past decade. In 2005 alone, when pretax farm profits were at a near-record $72 billion, the federal government handed out more than $25 billion in aid, almost 50 percent more than the amount it pays to families receiving welfare.
So much of our political attention is focused on welfare received by the really poor. I've heard more affluent people say many times that those on welfare "should just get a job." Yet here we have people--some not even farming, others not even farming the crops they were expected to farm, and others receiving good pay for their crops and thus not in need of government support--benefiting from a program that was originally intended as a "limited safety net for working" farmers. And this program amounts to "almost more than 50 percent more" than those receiving traditional welfare payments.
Who collects some of this money?
- 67-year-old Donald R. Matthews in El Campo, Texas, bought an 18-acre lot which was once part of a rice farm. He built a home on it and receives $1300 annually from the government--farm subsidy money.
- Residents of the River Oaks neighborhood in Houston have benefited from the farm subsidies. Over a ten-year period, Mary Ann Hudson received $191,000; Houston surgeon Jimmy Frank Howell received $490,709.
- Absentee landlords benefit.
- Subdivisions built on farmland benefit.
When people scream about who benefits from welfare payments, they overlook the real abusers: the affluent. Unbelievable. Read the entire report: "Harvesting Cash: A Year-Long Investigation by the Washington Post, by Dan Morgan, Gilbert M. Gaul, and Sarah Cohen.
1 comment:
Sickening. Reminds me of the railroads that received huge land grants in the late 19th century to put down rails from the Midwest to the West, land that eventually passed to logging companies that have created huge checkerboard swaths of clearcuts for thousands of miles, and even though Congress has oversight, it maintains a blind eye to it all to this day.
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