THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 1, 1995 TAG: 9504280036
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
The farm states of the Midwest and Great Plains are Republican territory. That makes GOP willingness to propose deep cuts in farm subsidies both admirable and courageous.
Yet it's happening. Indiana's Sen. Dick Lugar has made a cut of $15 billion out of the programs over five years a centerpiece of his presidential bid. Other Republicans are proposing cuts in the $10 billion-a-year programs that range from 50 percent to virtual elimination.
House Majority Leader Dick Armey has likened farm programs to ``Moscow on the Mississippi,'' a near-socialist meddling with free markets. And the Heritage Foundation has now come out for scraping most of the giveaways that largely benefit agribusiness, distort markets and serve little useful purpose.
President Clinton, who carried almost no farm states in 1992, must sense a political opportunity. He visited Iowa this week to weep crocodile tears over the vanishing family farm and to promise to preserve the complex system of subsidies and price supports that Republicans have finally begun to target.
Clinton claimed the country's $20 billion annual surplus in agricultural trade means tampering with the status quo would be a mistake, said we couldn't cut subsidies if foreign producers refused to level the playing field and argued that the nation must not ``turn and walk away from the farmers of this country in the name of cutting spending.''
He's wrong on all counts, except perhaps political expediency. Family farms have been going the way of the Great Auk for 100 years, despite elaborate programs. There's little the government can do to reverse trends that have more to do with economic and technological forces than with legislative policy. Besides, most of the present help goes to benefit large industrial farm operations, not Norman Rockwell family farmers.
The very success of American farmers argues against the need for government programs, not for them. Most were created to lend a hand during the Great Depression. Times have changed; only government remains wedded to New Deal economics. Those farm products not subject to government intrusion - most vegetable crops, for instance, - have had no trouble prospering. Time for peanuts, tobacco, corn and sugar to do likewise.
If foreign subsidies do distort competition, the answer is not to emulate them and distort it further, but to penalize offenders. Finally, the talk about walking away from farmers in the name of cutting spending is ludicrous.
Farmers - like manufacturers and service workers - are perfectly capable of competing on their own. Taking money out of the pockets of hard-working middle-class employees to subsidize agribusiness is not noble, it's unfair. It's pork that politicians trade for votes.
At a time of $200 billion annual deficits, cutting spending is a lot more vital than continuing anachronistic subsidies that have outlived their usefulness. Republicans have had the guts to admit it. Clinton, who ran on the promise to reduce the deficit and help the middle class, should acknowledge that farm programs do neither and get aboard. by CNB