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Heritige Foundation
Morning Bell: A Bumper Crop of Food Stamps
by Amy Payne
May 21, 2013
Where do food stamps come from?
They come from taxpayers—certainly not from family farms. Yet the
“farm” bill, a recurring subsidy-fest in Congress, is actually 80
percent food stamps and other government nutrition programs.
The food stamps sweeten the farm deal for lawmakers, who admit that the
combination works for their political purposes. As Heritage experts
Daren Bakst and Diane Katz explain:
The food stamp portion creates a reason for urban representatives to
support farm subsidies, and for farm-state lawmakers to support food
stamps.
Talk of de-politicizing agriculture programs and welfare policy is met
with stiff resistance. For example, Senator Thad Cochran (R–MS),
ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, recently told
the North American Agricultural Journalists group that food stamps
should continue to be included in the farm bill “purely from a
political perspective. It helps get the farm bill passed.”
Food stamps are there to help “get the farm bill passed.” And the
relation of the rest of the farm bill to farming is also questionable.
Bakst and Katz note that “Congress has expanded the farm bill over time
into a costly compilation of disparate programs. Along with agriculture
and food stamps, the legislation includes dozens of forestry,
conservation, energy, and rural development programs.”
It has become the norm that Congress lumps billions—even trillions—of
dollars in taxpayer-funded programs together into huge bills. This
allows them to sneak in plenty of special-interest pork.
For the rest of this article, go to Heritage Foundation
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