They couldn’t pass a farm bill because they wanted to cut the Food Stamp program … so I decided to look at some numbers and unless you are fully adept at reading gibberish in the government records it was difficult at best…I really wanted to know how much of a cut that huge number of 20 billion would be…
SO… I just goggled it up and found others reports that the current proposed farm bill appears to be about 1 Trillion dollars estimated over 10 years…
? wow that is a huge number to start with… next…
I see that there was a proposed cut of 20 billion from the food stamp program… ok…
from the last farm bill passed the food stamp program was 66% of the farm bill… SHIT 2/3 of the farm bill is not even going to farmers? not even paying for real farm needs? see below notes from the 2008 farm bill. back to the topic at hand…
At 66% (assuming the same breakdown as 2008) for food stamps, that would be 66% of 998 billion… or about 659 billion in food stamps and then cut by 20 billion or about 3%
Most of us have suffered more than a 3% cut in our incomes, retirements, or costs in just the past year or two? At this point I think the idiots in Washington can’t see the forest for the trees? or they are too busy making deals to keep their jobs rather than take care of the people that sent them up there… oh wait… I guess they are taking care of the people that sent them up there as we now have almost 47% of the population not paying taxes and seems that there is now 1 out of 5 households on food stamps or in the programs?
No let me top all that with, I found that so far the government has run about 30% low on estimates for the costs of these bills…? (see chart below from the first linked article).
I used to work in the USDA… and one of my pet peeves was that too many “farmers” were “farming the programs” but the whole thing has become a circus in Washington. I understand that the food stamps were tied to the farm bill years ago to help get the actual farm bill accepted by the “non-farm” politicians, but maybe the time has come to let it stand on it’s own? I for one think we now have too many give-away programs (food stamps, welfare, etc.) Why should people want or need to work when they can get a free ride for not working… ? All the give away programs need to be put together in to one agency and one spot so they can be see for what they are… and then see what cuts can be made?
In my search for the above number I found numerous websites for the government help, and here are some of the welfare lists… hell they have webpages to help people find ways to not work…
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/federalbenefitprograms/tp/toptenbenefits.htm
The Catalog of Federal domestic assistance
The Economic Progress Institute (formerly the Poverty Institute)?
Glance: A cost breakdown of farm bill programs
Posted 5/15/2008
By The Associated Press
Domestic nutrition programs make up the largest portion of the estimated $300 billion farm bill. Crop subsidies make up roughly 14 percent, foreign food aid less than 1 percent.
A breakdown of the bill:
_ Food stamps and other domestic nutrition programs such as emergency food assistance: just over 66 percent, about $200 billion.
_ Subsidies for rice, cotton, corn, soybeans, wheat and other crops: 14 percent, around $43 billion.
_ Conservation programs to set aside or protect environmentally sensitive farmland: 9 percent, about $27 billion.
_ Crop insurance to help farmers protect against losses: 8 percent, about $23 billion.
_ Foreign food aid would make up less than 1 percent of the bill, costing less than $200 million. The bulk of international food assistance is in annual appropriations bills.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
So I have wasted 40+ years working, building a retirement, thinking I had too, when I could have been a starving artist and just drawn welfare checks…
All this started from reading one of my investment letters and had this excerpt in it…
Grab some food stamps…they don’t cost nothing. Some things don’t need to be examined to know what kind of an effect they will have on consumer psyches, spending habits, and ultimately aggregate demand. According to the USDA, there are more than 47 million Americans on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as food stamps. Since the end of the depression in June 2009, food stamp assistance has accelerated by 30.8 percent, dwarfing job creation of 3.8 percent during the same period. This said, it should come as no surprise grocery and health and wellness in aggregate make up about 66 percent of Wal-Mart’s revenues. More stores are adjusting space for the inclusion of groceries.
Oh and what about another depressing chart…?
We are now worse off than we were in 1981? and are paying for more people on the free end?
WD0AJG