Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Abolish the U.S. Department of Agriculture

The USDA budget is about $135-140 billion annually.  Of that, approximately $2 billion is spent on food safety inspections and plant and animal safety.  I'm OK with that $2 billion -- though half of it is probably wasted.  We can keep that part.  The rest of the USDA should be shut down today. 

I was out over the weekend, and we passed by this farm near where I grew up.  There was a lot of corn planted.  I asked about it and was told it was for silage.  It's on a dairy farm run by what they said were "people from Sweden or some such place". 

The thing is, these foreigners were able to come into the States and set up a nice operation with financial help from the USDA.  In just one recent instance, it became known that this operation ran up a bill of about $30,000 at a local farm store. The bill was paid by the USDA. 

This is far too typical of the corporate cronyism in agriculture and other industries.  If you know the right people and are willing to jump through the various government hoops, you can make a good living on taxpayer dollars.  The family farm is being destroyed while corporate farms and agribusiness giants like Cargill and ADM prosper. 

Government dependence is bad -- whether one is a welfare queen in East St. Louis cranking out bastard babies for fun and profit or a business-suited CEO getting "free" money from the taxpaying serfs in this country. 

4 comments:

  1. Hear, hear! The only way I can get some of your money (and a little of everybody else's around here via the USDA) is to let some cattle roam in the creek, which I wouldn't do, then they will help me pay to fence it off.

    I sure wish the USDA would pay my fertilizer bill. Costing me 90 bucks an acre. Have to do it a couple of acres at a time as the money comes in. Trying to be a good land steward and all that.

    If I were a member of a minority class there are all sorts of goodies to be had, if I remember correctly from the last newsletter I threw out in disgust.

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  2. I understand the Chinese get deals like this too from the USDA. Odd, because when my husband and I bought our little five acres we had to prove we were US citizens in order to buy. Trying to get a VA loan was near impossible. Sad when a country has so little regard for it's own citizens.

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  3. I agree. Every time I turn around I discover yet another program that the politicians hafta waste our tax dollars on, whether it's big business subsidies, affirmative action grants (although they never call it that) or loopholes, or whatever.

    The only govt. agency that ever gets cut back is the military (not that it isn't justified sometimes), but every other govt. agency just keeps growing and spending more.

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  4. It seems as though the system is upside down and backwards. What you all are saying mirrors my nephew's comment that the people who might actually benefit from some help are the least likely to get it.

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