US Opinions: getting the dead off the dole

Our View - Thursday
August 1, 2007 - 11:41PM

Pushing up paychecks
Let’s start by getting the dead off the dole

Federal government programs live forever: maybe their beneficiaries do, too. A Government Accountability Office report released last week found that the Department of Agriculture distributed more than $1.1 billion over seven years to the estates or companies of farmers who had died. The department approved these payments without any review 40 percent of the time, while 38 percent of the cases had “weaknesses” including “nonexistent or vague” documentation.
And this was just a sample of 181 cases from 1999-2005.
Safeguards against this sort of waste and fraud need to be established before Congress renews another five-year farm bill, which will dole out hundreds of billions of dollars. Taxpayers need assurance that the widespread gaming of farm programs will be curtailed, before they sign up for yet another round of giveaways.
Estates are allowed to collect farm subsidies for up to two years after an owner’s death, giving heirs time to restructure the business and clear probate. Then local Agriculture Department officials are supposed to certify each year that the heirs are still farming and have kept the land for reasons other than merely to collect subsidies. But the Agriculture Department acts as if its mission is to send out checks, rather than to help people who are actually engaged in farming. This outrage is minor when compared with the larger scandal of the farm subsidy program itself, which has evolved into a massive giveaway to the wealthy that actually discourages the small farmer in whose name the program is continued.
Agriculture Department figures show, as the Washington Post reported, that “in 2004 a third of agricultural payouts went to ‘very large’ operations that boasted average annual incomes above a quarter of a million dollars. These subsidies have helped push rural land prices up and small family farmers out of the market.” From 2000-06 the government paid $1.3 billion of your money to landowners who didn’t farm at all.
And this is just a snapshot of what goes on in federal farm programs. “Some of Utah’s wealthiest residents have benefited from federal farm subsidies, including a billionaire and the owner of the Utah Jazz,” a wire service reported this week. James L. Sorenson, who became a billionaire with real estate and medical equipment businesses, received $600,000 in farm payments between 1995 to 2005, according to the story. Utah Jazz owner and car dealer Larry Miller, a millionaire, wasn’t sure why his wife received $239,000 in farm payments for a ranch they own in Idaho. “Evidently we’ve got some land where you get government subsidies for not planting,” Miller said. “I think that’s very silly to get paid on something like that.”
But that didn’t stop him, like it doesn’t stop many Americans, from taking the check. It’s “free” money after all.
Our farm subsidy program increases food prices, which mainly hurts the poor, and is a huge barrier to trade agreements. The recent Doha round of trade talks went belly-up because of disagreements over European and American (and Korean and Japanese) farm subsidies.
Congress back in 1996 passed the “Freedom to Farm Act,” which was supposed to help wean the ag sector from its addiction to handouts and make it more market-oriented. But dependency and farm spending exploded since then, prompting some to dub the bill the “Freedom to Freeload Act.”
The Democratic Congress came in promising to change the way Washington works and shake up the old ways of narrow interest-group politics. But its actions on the next farm bill suggest that nothing has changed, and that the feeding frenzy at the federal trough will continue.