A Stitch in Haste

The White House is considering taking another stab at curtailing what may be the single dumbest idea in all of government:

President Bush is asking Congress to halt farm subsidies to anyone making more than $200,000 in adjusted gross income. The current income cap is $2.5 million.
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"Farm subsidies are America's largest corporate welfare program," said Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. "They are promoted as saving small family farmers in a Norman Rockwell vision of the world. The reality is, the majority of farm subsidies go to corporate farms."
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The income limit is a new approach to an old problem. The ceiling on farm payments is $360,000, but loopholes allow some people to collect millions of dollars above the limit.

Two hasty stitches:

1. It bears emphasizing that the proposed $200,000 limit, let alone the current $2.5 million ceiling, is a profit figure, despite being called "adjusted gross income." It is not a revenue figure. It is comparable to an employee's salary or a small businessman's gross margin.

Which means that farmers are making -- netting -- as much as $2.5 million per year and still receiving taxpayer subsidies. Even the Administration's reform proposal would allow a farmer to clear up to $200,000 per year and still receive agricultural welfare.

Could you imagine, say, a New York City investment banker who makes $200,000 a year crying poverty and asking for a welfare check? Or how about the owner of a gay bar in the Castro who clears that much annually -- should he get an extra check courtesy of taxpayers? Are such people "poor"?

But if you're a farmer -- a millionaire farmer -- then the indignation somehow vanishes and too much subsidization is never enough. Because food is -- somehow -- "different."

It boggles the mind.

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2. There is a simple reason why farm subsidies never die: The United States Senate. All the sparsely populated agricultural states have wildly disproportionate representation in the Senate -- which is reflected in the size, scope and seeming permanence of farm welfare. It simply has too many bodyguards in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body to come to any real harm.

Which is not to say that we should abolish the Senate. But as current demographic trends continue, the composition of the two chambers of Congress will diverge even more. Which may be good for gridlock when it comes to preventing new bad programs, but will also be an impediment to scrapping existing bad programs.