Rod Dreher shakes his head at the House Republican’s farm bill, which boosts Big Ag subsidies and forgoes food stamp aid:
The Republican Party is throwing corporate welfare at farmers, but telling people who are so poor they qualify for government aid to feed themselves that they are not a priority. As a matter of basic politics, the Republicans have lost their minds. This is Mitt Romney’s 47 percent remark all over again.
President Obama has vowed to veto this GOP farm bill if it hits his desk, so Congress is going to have to try again. You know who needs to find their voice and use it right now? Conservative Christian pastors and leaders. Christians need to seriously reconsider uncritical support for a political party that prioritizes lavishing subsidies on the agribusiness rich while telling the poor to sit quietly and wait for scraps.
Kinsley is puzzled:
Forget about kids going to bed hungry. (Melodramatic, but accurate.) Can this possibly be good politics?
Are there actually people out there waiting for a candidate who will kill the food stamp program? It takes your breath away. The Republicans have now cornered the heartless vote. But are there enough heartless people in this country to counterbalance the sane people fleeing the other way?
The net effect of the farm bill, as it stands now in the House, is to take money away from a successful program for making sure that no one starves, and giving it to a variety of programs whose goal is to raise the price of food, for the poor and everyone else. Even if you only care about how things look, this does not look good, it seems to me.
Fred Matzner walks through the wreckage of the bill:
To start with, the bill takes aim at the environment by first crippling, and then outright ending, conservation programs, as well as zeroing out mandatory funding for rural renewable energy and efficiency development. Thousands of farmers from every state have participated in these programs, generating income while helping restore wetlands and prairies, reducing fertilizer and pesticide pollution that poison our rivers and drinking water, and decreasing the nation’s reliance on polluting fossil fuels.
In stark contrast, the bill would make permanent billions of dollars in subsidies for corporate farmers. This would upend decades of precedent and lock taxpayers into these high costs, at least creating a deterrent to regular updating and improving of our farm policies, and at worst threatening the continuation of important policies to protect soil, water, wildlife, and public health.
More Dish on the GOP’s big government bill here.
The Dish 