Call Your Congressmen NOW.. 80% of the Farm Bill Is WELFARE

[Leanne King]

Policymakers say that the Farm Bill is about helping farms, but this just isn’t true.
In reality, the Farm Bill is a big welfare bill in disguise. The “Farm Bill” label merely allows the ever-growing spending on welfare programs to cause the price tag for the entire package to swell, contributing to our nation’s budget woes.
Before we can improve U.S. farm policy, we first need to recognize that the Farm Bill is a giant welfare bill, and it needs serious change.
Contact your Representatives today and tell them to “Trim the Fat!” in the Bloated Farm Bill.
It’s hard to believe, but the numbers show that a whopping eighty percent of Farm Bill spending goes toward food stamp and nutrition programs. The rest is welfare of a different kind: corporate welfare. The bill includes pork-like programs that do more to support special interests than small farmers, since the benefits go toward the biggest and best-connected farms that know how to navigate the Washington maze.
Every five years Congress must vote to reauthorize these USDA programs or watch them expire, meaning that the so-called Farm Bill is an opportunity to make serious reforms and real cuts to the billions we waste on farm subsidies and food stamps.
The Senate already rammed the Farm Bill through, and they failed to make meaningful cuts. The
House of Representatives is expected to take up the issue this week, and they need to hear from you that you oppose spending hundreds of billions of dollars on even more food and farm welfare.

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[amanda choate]

According to the guys who took the time to write the Constitution, it was their explicit goal:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

They didn't do it out of charity, it is the cost of having a free and open society. Bob Marley said in one of his songs, " a hungry mob is an angry mob." There can be no domestic tranquility, general welfare or justice in a nation of hungry people.

 

[amanda choate]

It is not charity to feed your citizens, it is whjat makes us a nation. If you have any nation with over 310 million people in it, there are goingt o be those who cannot take care of themselves, either acutely or chronically. It is just numbers. And since we don't live in Bangladesh, we take from the enormous wealth we have, and ensure that there are not people starving in the streets. And no, that is not the "responsibility" of churches. It is ALL of our responsibility. You have use of things that you had no part in paying for, someone else paid for it and you get to take advantage of it now

We can't all be rich. Or even employed. Bur the thought of a kid not feeling secure enough about even their next meal is more than I can stand, as a mother and a citizen.

[amanda choate]

Yes, more people receive food stamps now, but many fewer people are on welfare. That was the trade-off in the welfare to workfare deal. MAny states use foodstamps as there welfare programs. The thinking was with this program rather than a check, families would get a menas to buy food. Most foodstamp recipients are either elderly or school age, all live at or below poverty level. If we do not use our wealth as a nation to feed our fellow citizens in need, then we aren't much of a country.

[amanda choate]

That the farm bill contains funding for food stamps is "alarming" is stupid. Food stamp funding has always been in the farm bill. That Conagra, ADM and others corporate interests get money designed to protect the family farm is the problem. Over eighty percent of farm subsidies go to huge coorporate interets.

[joshua simpson]

I just watched a John Stossel episode about this, all you have to do is claim that you are "attempting" to farm, and your in.