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Editorial -- Farm bill debate needs more talk, less big threats Tuesday, November 13, 2007
The White House brought out its heavy hammer last week when President Bush threatened to veto the Senate farm bill for a host of reasons. Some of those reasons are laudable and others are just laughable.
The Bush team's harsh criticism of the farm bill includes a charge that the Senate is being fundamentally dishonest. Bush's interim ag secretary, Charles Conner, charged the Senate's bill would raise taxes and uses "budget gimmicks'' to pay for priorities that deserve to be funded in an honest fashion.''
The White House has some gall to charge the Senate farm bill's authors with using budget gimmicks when the administration has somehow managed to make the cost of the Iraq War disappear from the budget. Their charge is little more than the pot calling the kettle black. Budget gimmickry has been used for decades in Washington, which in no small part has contributed to a massive federal deficit that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have to account for.
Schafer says the Senate package contains $22 billion in budget gimmicks and $15 million in tax increases as well as $7 billion in shifted commodity payments and an additional $3 billion in shifts to crop insurance payments.
The Bush administration also opposes other parts of the legislation. It wants a tough payment limit on direct assistance to farmers and doesn't get it in the Senate bill. It also charges that the bill's language would make American farmers fat targets for foreign country's complaints about trade-distorting subsidies.
The Bush administration wants more reform. Nothing wrong with that approach, but the administration's sledge-hammer-like criticism is more than a little overboard.
Senate and House conferees will have to sit down and work out their differences to produce the legislation before year's end.
Schafer should tone the criticism down and sit down with Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. Collin Peterson to see where common ground exists.
Whatever farm bill results from negotiations will be seriously flawed. That's because the system that produced it is a wreck, ruined by a flood of corporate lobbying power and a fruitless fixation on capturing foreign markets through one-sided trade deals.
The opportunity for real farm policy reform still exists. It's up to the Bush White House and the conferees to make it happen. We urge all parties involved to focus on these critical issues -- rural economic development, more assistance to beginning farmers, meaningful payment limits, incentives and rewards for conservation, renewable energy incentives and an end to trade deals that promise much and deliver precious little. |
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