$290 Billion Farm Bill Monstrosity While Infrastructure Crumbles
by Judd WileyMay 23rd, 2008, 11:00 am
The stupid, incompetent Democrats and the gutless, sell-out Republicans in Congress have, as expected, overridden President Bush’s veto of this year’s massive, bloated, gluttonous, and completely unnecessary farm bill.
The price tag? $290 b-b-b-billion. Ordinary Americans of all political persuasions should be outraged.
The crooked inside-the-beltway wheeler and dealers have, once again, caved to the special interest farm lobbyists, placed short-term rewards ahead of the country’s long-term interests, and screwed the citizens out of seeing any tangible benefit from the income taxes they send to Washington every April.
The bill shovels taxpayer dollars directly into the bank accounts of giant agribusinesses and individual growers of wheat, corn, cotton, rice, soybeans, sugar, and on and on and on. Never mind that farm income is at an all-time high. This is government welfare for a completely undeserving 1 percent of the national population, many of whom are millionaires.
How did this rotting tub of pork chops make it through Congress? Easy. Farm special interest groups spent over $80 million last year on lobbying, mostly to buy votes for this bill. They gave money to the campaigns of legislators from rural districts in return for their votes. These legislators then added enough school lunch and food stamp programs into the bill to sucker the gullible, riff-raff urban legislators into voting for it.
Here’s how the $290 billion breaks down.
- $40 billion is paid directly to farmers to subsidize their crops.
- $30 billion is paid to farmers to keep their land idle, and miscellaneous environmental nonsense.
- The balance goes to “nutrition programs” (school lunch, food stamps, etc.) to buy the votes of the stupid urban legislators.
That’s $290 billion not going towards expanding the highways, reinforcing bridges and tunnels, modernizing the subway systems, creating a national high-speed rail line, upgrading and improving the airports, and so on.
And these stupid asses come to us and tell us we need to pay more taxes, tolls, fees, fines, and creepy crawly surcharges because there’s no money in the public coffers. Shut the hell up, and stop insulting our intelligence. The money is already there. Our stupid elected officials just flushed $290 billion down the toilet.
I’m so angry right now I want to drive my SUV right up the steps of the Capitol and into the Senate chamber and punch Harry Reid in his damn face.
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Posted in Congress, Politics, Spending |
We are on the same page.
Makes me think of all of those parochialist “environmentalist” organizations that act as if we had to choose between building highways and rail transit as an either/or.
Such fools eve behave this way perpetually as if one could not be built before — rather then simply instead — of the other. The Washington DC freeway battles that I cover “A Trip Within The Beltway” are a primary example.
http://wwwtripwithinthebeltway.blogspot.com/2007/01/and-so-does-us-national-capital.html
Your system does not like long urls.
Please check out the Jan and Feb archives — as a start — of A Trip Within the Beltway!
Jan and Feb 2007.
There you go.