2/09/2005 08:01:20 AM|||Toni|||Rich Lowry:Townhall.

What really bugs me about farm subsidies is that this is just another name for corporate welfare. Just think about it, Ted Turner gets farm subsidies, Sam Donaldson gets farm subsidies, Cargill, ADM.....all of these corporations get farm subsidies. How stupid is that? Yet, when anyone tries to touch this sacred cow all the small time farmers get their undies in a knot. However, most of these small time farmers are actually corporations too. There's a website if I can find it again where you can find out who is getting how much in subsidies. Farmers have gotten pretty ingenious at playing the welfare queen to drink at the trough of the US government.

Excerpt:
As The New York Times recently reported, farm income doubled during the past two years, and -- holy soybean! -- farm subsidies still went up 40 percent. Farmers game the commodity markets to get both high prices for their products and high federal subsidies. It goes to show that few things are as addictive and distorting as a government handout.

and
"The subsidies reward the guy who gets higher yields with higher subsidies, and he's able to buy out his neighbor and get even bigger," says Dennis Avery, an agriculture expert at the Hudson Institute.

Ten percent of farms -- i.e., the biggest ones -- receive 60 percent of the subsidies. According to Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, giant Riceland Foods got $110 million in federal largess alone last year. By his calculation, the feds could guarantee every full-time farmer an income of $35,000 a year at a cost of "merely" $4 billion. Subsidies now run roughly $15.7 billion annually.

The small time farmer is an illusion of the past. They just don't exist anymore. Most farming families have consolidated themselves to corporations and may include many family members under one umbrella they are actually huge corporations such as Cargill or ADM.

|||110795771959015794|||Ending red-state welfare as we know it.