Dear Representative:
Taxpayers for Common Sense Action (TCS Action), a non-partisan budget watchdog, strongly urges you NOT to support efforts to bring the unnecessary, costly, and counter-productive agriculture disaster relief bill to the floor and to resist all attempts to force this wasteful package of subsidies onto taxpayers’ shoulders. TCS Action understands there are efforts underway to force this measure to the floor through a discharge petition. We urge you to oppose all such attempts. Both the President and Secretary of Agriculture Johanns have cautioned against this measure, and we agree that taxpayers can ill afford this latest, ill-conceived set of give-aways.
At a cost of $6.5 billon, the proposed disaster relief measures do little to aid the majority of farmers and represent the continuation of a broken commodity subsidy system which wastes taxpayer dollars, invites retaliatory tariffs on American exports, encourages the production of huge surpluses that lower world crop prices, and threatens to impede successful global trade negotiations.
Of particular concern is the use of increased direct payments as part of the agriculture package. As is common with commodity subsidies, only one-third of America’s farmers are even eligible to receive these bonus payments. Of those who are, the majority will receive crumbs while a handful of big producers will devour most of the pie. In fact, 10 percent of the bonus subsidy recipients will collect nearly 60 percent of the money.
In short, we agree with the President’s assessment that, “The 2002 Farm Bill was designed, when combined with crop insurance, to eliminate the need for ad hoc disaster assistance. In 2005, many crops had record or near-record production, and U.S. farm sector cash receipts were the second highest ever.”
Again, we encourage you to block the $6.5 billion in ineffective agriculture hand-outs currently being proposed. Doing so would send a strong message in anticipation of the 2007 Farm Bill that it is time to reexamine current policies that rely on government support instead of market forces to sustain the agriculture sector.
Sincerely,
Steve Ellis
Vice President of Programs
Weekly Email
