Cash for concrete farmers
July 27, 2007| By By DeEtte Chatterton
When politicians talk about protecting American farms, visions of vast wheat fields and hard-working farmers feeding America come to mind. Unfortunately, the United States government cannot distinguish between a field and a fraud.
Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner exposes one of the most wasteful federal spending practices in America: farm subsidies.
Over 1,705 “farmers”—people or groups who’ve cashed farm subsidy checks this year—list a ZIP code in the crowded Chicago metropolitan area as their home address, writes Feulner. “It’s difficult to imagine what these farms are raising in this ZIP code, since the things that grow best here seem to be tall structures, including the Metcalfe and Kluczynski Federal Buildings,” Feulner says of one “farming community.”
These “concrete farmers” aren’t the only ones benefiting from government handouts, which are justified with platitudes about protecting the American farmer. “Conservation groups have pulled in more than a million dollars combined in federal farm subsidies the last three years,” Feulner points out. He explains that the government has used farm subsidy money to pay groups to stop growing crops and convert farmland into wetlands.
The biggest problem with all of this waste, says Feulner, is that the American people are picking up the tab. Farm subsidies cost the average household over $200 in taxes and $104 in higher food prices every year.
Feulner suggests that we give Americans the right to farm, free from government interference. We should allow private citizens, and not meddling bureaucrats, to protect our nation’s wetlands. And we should stop wasting hard-earned tax dollars.
Unfortunately, Feulner’s dose of common-sense conservatism is no longer available on a weekly basis. His column used to run each Wednesday in The Chicago Sun-Times, but their new editorial editor was told, “Don’t be conservative,” and she duly cut his column. If only it were that easy to cut wasteful farm subsidies.
is an intern at The Heritage Foundation.
