Word: farm
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...foreign protein would be even worse than our dependence on foreign oil. "The subsidies help keep us in business, so we can play in the dirt and you don't have to grow your own food," says Ben Boyd, a Georgia cotton farmer who's active in the Farm Bureau. "It's not like we're all living in plantations like Tara, wearing fancy white suits like Colonel Sanders...
...every loaf of bread or box of cornflakes. When commodities are cheap, the main beneficiaries are well-heeled grain -and-livestock processors like Cargill, Tyson and Archer Daniels Midland. No, the real goal has always been to protect farmers from the vagaries of the weather and the market. Farming is indeed a risky business--most businesses are risky businesses--and farm policies have tried to reduce that risk by any means available. The result has been an evolving mix of income supports, price supports, disaster relief, government purchases of surplus crops for school lunches or foreign aid, and "supply controls...
...decades, this largesse was fairly uncontroversial. Georgians didn't like the sugar program, and Minnesotans rolled their eyes about cotton subsidies, but everyone made sure everyone else got theirs. In the 1970s, the House and Senate agriculture committees cleverly tacked food stamps onto farm bills to solidify the support of urban legislators. But when Republicans seized Congress in 1994, promising a revolutionary age of fiscal conservatism and free-market capitalism, they vowed to gut command-and-coddle farm policies that they compared to Soviet communism. They wanted the government to treat agriculture like any other business, and they said they...
That was the deal enshrined by the Freedom to Farm law of 1996--except the part about no more subsidies. "The regular order took over," recalled Dan Glickman, a former Kansas Congressman who was President Clinton's Agriculture Secretary. "There was a lot of hefty intellectual discussion about weaning farmers off the dole, but of course, it didn't happen." Instead, GOP leaders agreed the next farm bill would wean farmers off subsidies but only after they received seven years of guaranteed transitional payments--even when prices were high. Farmers also received more generous crop-insurance subsidies so that Congress...
...election-year farm bill didn't wean farmers off subsidies either; it was the most profligate yet. It created new "countercyclical payments" for bad times, while extending transitional payments for all times, renaming them "direct payments" so no one had to keep pretending they were temporary. Texas Republican Larry Combest--then chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, now another agribusiness lobbyist--threatened to block legislation enhancing Bush's power to negotiate trade deals if he didn't sign the farm bill. Bush signed...