Ag subsidies: It's time to cap payments

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When the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee visited the Lancaster County Fair earlier this month, he warned that the flow of subsidies is destined to slow in the next farm bill.

The prediction from Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., was echoed by Rep. Tom Osborne: "I think commodity supports, as we now know them, are going to be difficult to sustain."

To make those spending cuts, Congress should look first at putting a tighter cap on farm payments.

Spending now is limited to $360,000 per recipient. But big landowners get around the cap by spinning off separate business entities so they can go on collecting huge sums. About two-thirds of farm payments go to one tenth of of recipients.

Not only is the current system full of loopholes that allow big operators to legally siphon off most of the tax dollars, it also is subject to abuse from unscrupulous landowners, such as the Mississippi farmer who set up a scheme with multiple companies — including one named Get Rich Farms — that netted $11 million in tax subsidies.

As Congress gears up to rewrite the farm bill in 2007, there appears to be considerable support for enacting tighter caps, except from the powerful minority of people who benefit from them.

As syndicated columnist Alan Guebert reported in the Sunday Journal Star earlier this month, a poll by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation found that 67 percent of voters in Iowa, Kansas and Minnesota favored a cap of $250,000.

The level of support in Nebraska for payment limitations hovers around the same level, according to the Nebraska Rural Poll conducted by the University of Nebraska.

The conservative Heritage Foundation says that current farm subsidies are America's largest corporate welfare program. Advocates like Chuck Hassebrook of the Center for Rural Affairs say that the current program actually undermines medium-size and small farms.

Previous efforts to establish tighter and more effective subsidy caps have faltered in Congress, despite support from members of Nebraska's delegation.

Now, unfortunately, some members of Congress are targeting food stamps as a way to cut $3 billion from farm programs over the next five years. Four out of five food stamp dollars go to children, elderly or disabled Americans.

Instead of cutting those funds, Congress ought to find the backbone to cut back on the corporate welfare program that is transferring millions of tax dollars to the pockets of wealthy landowners. It should enact effective caps on farm subsidies.