Ending Farm Welfare As We Know It

Just about everything in Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan's budget blueprint has caught unshirted hell from critics: the tax rates, the Medicare vouchers, the safety-net cuts. The one thing that hasn't? The cuts to farm subsidies. If past is prologue, that means the subsidies are probably safe. Ryan wants to trim $3 billion a year from a $15 billion annual total in farm support programs. This is a modest goal—perhaps too modest. After all, farm subsidies are one thing about which all sides can agree: George Will disdains them—and so does Paul Krugman, who calls them "grotesque." The conservative Heritage Foundation terms farm subsidies "America's largest corporate welfare program." The liberal ThinkProgress dubs them "highly regressive." President Clinton tried to rein them in. So did President Bush—both the Elder and the Younger. "Bush Attacks Farm Subsidies," reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1990. Eighteen years later Reuters reported, "House Overrides Bush Veto of U.S. Farm Bill." If left, right, and center stand united in their opposition to subsidies, then why do the programs thrive?...more