Farm Subsidies

Who would have guessed that the federal government has been inefficiently handing out farm subsidy checks? In today's paper, the Washington Post has a huge spread about how $1.3 billion has been doled out to non-farmers. Excerpt: bq. [T]he federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all, according to an analysis of government records by The Washington Post. bq. [...] bq. What began in the 1930s as a limited safety net for working farmers has swollen into a far-flung infrastructure of entitlements that has cost $172 billion over the past decade. In 2005 alone, when pretax farm profits were at a near-record $72 billion, the federal government handed out more than $25 billion in aid, almost 50 percent more than the amount it pays to families receiving welfare. bq. The Post's nine-month investigation found farm subsidy programs that have become so all-encompassing and generous that they have taken much of the risk out of farming for the increasingly wealthy individuals who dominate it. Read it all.