Wednesday, June 01, 2011

50+ Groups Urge Congress to Reject $1 Billion in Cuts to USDA Conservation Programs

The budget battles are on, witness this press release:

A coalition of more than 50 agriculture and conservation groups representing millions of Americans today are urging lawmakers to reject nearly $1 billion in proposed cuts to farm bill conservation programs. The organizations are asking the House Appropriations Committee to "ensure that reasonable funding levels are continued" when the committee meets today at 5 p.m. to vote on these huge cuts in the FY2012 agriculture appropriations bill; $500 million already has been slashed from farm bill conservation programs in the FY2011 spending bill.

What you really have here is 50 different lobbying groups who may lose part of their annual sustenance.

Notice the cuts are "huge" and funds have been "slashed". The only thing that has been "slashed" is people's bring home pay and what we really need is a "huge" tax cut, not the same old wasteful spending.

Additionally, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which assists farmers and ranchers in identifying and addressing natural resource concerns on their land, is facing cuts of nearly $100 million in the bill, depriving our farmers and ranchers of the technical assistance they need for effective conservation.

This assumes farmers and ranchers are incapable of "identifying and addressing" these issues or that any "technical assistance" if needed is not available in the private sector. That's two bad assumptions in my book.

These programs are really there to keep bureaucrats employed and to bribe private land owners into doing what the government thinks is best.

Well, the government can't manage the millions of acres it owns and surely should keep it's poor management practices away from private lands.

The cuts aren't "huge" enough, so "slash" away Congress, slash away.

2 comments:

johnr said...

having had to deal with our local conservation office I can truly say that we would be just as well off without them

Anonymous said...

This office like all other government offices have been swallowed up by the computer age. They don't even do windshield surveys any more. They just sit in their offices staring at the computer screen and pass along restrictive regulations.
I say stop funding them and see who squeaks.