Old MacDonald

The U.S. Congress has just passed a pork-laden farm bill that ostensibly cuts food stamp costs by $8 billion over ten years … see: CATO Institute Analysis.  La-di-f-ing-da … $8 billion out of $784 billion. That’s effectively nothing!  Food stamps (read EBT cards) now represent $776 billion out of $950 billion of “farm” bill spending over ten years.  That’s almost 82% of this bill’s total being spent on debit cards for the “poor” people in this country.  These debit cards are supposed to be used to buy food for children (the reason this amount is in the farm bill), but increasingly it is spent on anything but food.  If you need to raise your blood pressure, please read: Another Liberal Morphing.

Apart from the outrageous amounts being allocated for EBT cards, this bill has lots and lots of payments to special-interest farm groups … please refer back to the above CATO Institute analysis for more hypertension.  Congress people, both Democrat and Republican, apparently can’t help themselves. Once a program is started, for whatever noble purpose, it becomes a Christmas tree upon which more and more silly spending ornaments are hung … often bearing little relation to the original intended purpose.

 So, American farmers (now often large agri-businesses) are also sucking $166 billion out of American taxpayers over the next ten years for these farm-bill ornaments. This is primarily because we, the taxpayers, are not paying attention.  For instance, we allow our government to borrow $17 million a year from the Chinese to pay for our catfish oversight program.

E-I-E-I-O