Can I Get A Subsidy For My Tomato Plants ?

Fox Business reported yesterday that, “An estimated 90,000 people living in 350 ciites and towns across the country got nearly $400 million in taxpayer-funded crop subsidies last year…”

The Environmental Working Group, working with a Senate Agricultural committee to review farm spending, released the data.  Farm subsidies began in the Great Depression and were instituted to help struggling farmers keep their farms. 

The article further reports:

“But the group says an estimated $394 million in farm subsidies have been given to “absentee land owners and investors living in every major American city.”

“It adds that “in 2010, 7,767 residents of just five Texas cities – Lubbock, Amarillo, Austin, San Angelo and Corpus Christi – collected $61,748,945 in taxpayer-funded subsidies. Residents of Lubbock booked $24,839,154 in payments, putting it at the top of cities with 100,000+ populations that are home to farm subsidy recipients,” the watchdog group said in a statement.”

Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson asked in the New York Post yesterday:

“Net farm income is expected in 2011 to reach its highest levels in more than three decades, as a rapidly growing and food-short world increasingly looks to the United States to provide it everything from soybeans and wheat to beef and fruit. Yet the department this year will give a record $20 billion in various crop “supports” to the nation’s wealthiest farmers — with the richest 10 percent receiving over 70 percent.If farmers on their own are making handsome profits, why, with a $1.6 trillion annual federal deficit, is the USDA borrowing unprecedented amounts to subsidize them?”

 

What in the world is the government doing?  It seems to me that before we talk about cutting entitlements, we need to talk about basic wasteful and unnecessary spending.  Why in the world would we even consider raising the debt ceiling when the government is not even spending the tax money it receives wisely?  Getting money from the government has become a racket.  It’s time for it to end.