Up host Chris Hayes and his panelists talk about billions in farm subsidies included in the House's Farm Bill.
House Farm Bill: Billions in new agricultural subsidies
Sat Jul 14, 2012 3:58 PM EDT
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Chris Hayes' new book
Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another – from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball – imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters.
How did we get here? With "Twilight of the Elites," Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned a new American elite--one more prone to failure and corruption than any that came before it.
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- Twitter: @upwithchris
- Twitter: @chrislhayes
George Naylor & I spoke to Chris about all of this when he visited Des Moines 2 years ago, but he still misunderstands how to advocate for his own values, as do Mark Bittman, etc. Yes the farm bill illustrates conservative absurdities, but Chris fails to accurately explain it. They all fail to see the real MEGA issue and the politics of it. George gets it right, but doesn’t have time to correct it all. Original Farm bills, as George suggests, didn’t cost money (ie. 1936-1948 Commodity Programs netted a $1.8 billion from farmers into the government, with no commodity subsidies, “When Farm Bills Made a Profit”). These kinds of programs free up much more money for SNAP than what these people suggest.
The farm bill is much bigger in impact than Chris suggests, (because most if it his hidden, off books, not government spending,) and the real beneficiaries are different. The real beneficiaries are agribusiness buyers who have gotten trillions ($2 trillion just for corn and soybeans) in market gains below previous standards.
The government has never paid farmers “the difference.” between market prices and fair market value. They’ve only paid about 1 8th of the difference, as I show on a data chart (ie. for 2007) in “Hidden Farm Bill Pie” at zspace.
The chart here is false/misleading in several ways. 1. Farmers lost money (USDA-Economic Research Service) every year 1981-2006 except 1996 for the big 5 commodities, so, mostly, only people with off farm income (or marketing luck, or below market rent, etc.) survived, so off farm income (ie. household total) is a false standard of the farm economy. 2. Big farms, like small farms, get only about 1 8th of the drop in prices returned in subsidies, so they have the biggest HIDDEN reductions (“Hidden Farm Bill: Debunking 3 Myths”: slides 5 & 6). Giant AgBiz buyers got the full 8 8ths.
George describes a crop rotation, which the farm bill destroyed by lowering (1953-1995) and eliminating (1996-) price floors. It gave below cost feed ingredients (1981-2006) to CAFOs to take away the advantage of feeding your own grain at cost to your own livestock. A rotation with alfalfa and clover to create nitrogen from the air requires livestock to feed it to, to make it economical.
Bottom line on farm subsidies: not understanding “Hidden Farm Bill Pie”, they (not George) support bad (zero price floor) farm bills.