If you enjoyed P.J. O’Rourke’s farm bill rumination for the John Locke Foundation in 2007, you might appreciate the following information from American Enterprise Institute President Arthur C. Brooks. He discusses the new website AmericanBoondoggle.com.
Next week Congress comes back from the August recess–with two weeks of session before farm programs expire. The farm lobby will be pushing hard for the House of Representatives to take up the farm bill, which proposes to spend almost a trillion dollars over the next decade.
It’s no exaggeration to say that this year’s farm bill is an example of exactly what’s wrong with Washington. It embodies the two biggest threats to American free enterprise today: the heavy-handed central planning of statism and competition-destroying beggar-thy-neighbor cronyism. From the $5.6 billion spent annually on crop insurance subsidies to the $1.3 billion we spend on milk subsidies, American agriculture policy is replete with cronyism and special-interest subsidies.
It’s not fair, it’s bad economics, and it’s bad policy.
That’s why AEI is building on our yearlong research project “American Boondoggle: Fixing the Farm Bill” by launching AmericanBoondoggle.com, a one-stop shop for AEI research on the farm bill.
