FreedomTalks

John Stossel has a great piece in RCP on the embarassment that is our federal farm policy.

From 1999 through 2005, the USDA “paid $1.1 billion in farm payments in the names of 172,801 deceased individuals. … 40 percent went to those who had been dead for three or more years, and 19 percent to those dead for seven or more years.” One dead farmer got more than $400,000 during those years.

And they say you can’t take it with you.

Defending the USDA, the GAO adds, “The complex nature of some farming operations — such as entities embedded within other entities — can make it difficult for USDA to avoid making payments to deceased individuals.”

Exactly. The agricultural section of the U.S. code is nearly 1,800 pages.

There’s an easy way to avoid such absurdities: Abolish all farm subsidies.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Earmarks and Corruption, U.S. Budget. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.