Feds Pay Farmers to Till the Desert
No, this headline and story is not brought to you by The Onion.
The latest proof that there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary federal program:
As drought forces families in the West to shorten their showers and let their lawns turn brown, two Depression-era government programs have been paying some of the nation’s biggest farms hundreds of millions of dollars to grow water-thirsty crops in what was once desert.
My sympathy for this farmer lies somewhere between that which I have for Bernie Madoff and Ted Stevens:
Jim Hansen, a 69-year-old cotton grower in California’s Central Valley, said his family business would crumble if the government took away low-cost water and the nearly $1.7 million in crop payments he received in 2007 and 2008.
For more on the insanity that is federal farm policy and why the USDA needs to be downsized and/or done away with, click here.
Friday Podcast: ‘Obama’s Afghanistan Strategy’
President Obama has unveiled his plan for the war in Afghanistan, taking a more regional approach than the U.S. has in the past.
In Friday’s Cato Daily Podcast, foreign policy analyst Malou Innocent says it’s a critical step in the right direction, but stabilizing Afghanistan and fighting an insurgency can’t be accomplished while killing the livelihoods of so many Afghan farmers by destroying opium poppy.
In the future we should take Afghanistan as it is, rather than what we want it to be. So not only does that mean having a decreased reliance on a central state government from Kabul, but also understanding that many of the farms from these rural areas rely on the opium poppy crop for their own livelihood. So we should focus our efforts to targeting those who are in cahoots with insurgent groups and not simply those who are depending on it for their livelihood.
Her forthcoming paper, “Pakistan and the Future of U.S. Policy” will be released next month.
You Don’t Say
President Obama recently indicated that he would cut the fiscally irresponsible (yet minimally market distorting) direct payments that flow to farmers regardless of their production. An outcry from farming groups has, predictably, ensued.
Just as predictably: “A source in the administration says the proposal is being reconsidered because of the opposition it has received.“
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