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A bill to terminate agricultural direct payments beginning with the 2013 crop year, S. 334
This post A bill to terminate agricultural direct payments beginning with the 2013 crop year, S. 334 originally appeared on Truth About Bills
The Bill: S. 334, a bill to terminate agricultural direct payments beginning with the 2013 crop year
Annualized Savings: $3.0 billion ($14.9 billion over five years)
During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt’s enacted New Deal spending programs helped establish our contemporary agricultural subsidy system. The intention of the payments is to regulate the amount of food produced so that the price of farm products would stabilize and increase in tough economic times. A drop in prices of crops would trigger traditional subsidies to be awarded, sometimes without regard to how much these farms produced. The system remained largely the same until 1996, when direct cash payments were used to wean farmers and the agricultural industry off of the welfare-like payments. The measure was intended to be a short-term policy but was renewed in the 2002 and 2008 Farm bills.
Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) proposed S. 334, which would terminate all agricultural direct payments immediately. “Direct payments were designed to be temporary, and instead, have become an unnecessary giveaway, one we can’t afford, and it’s time for it to end,” Senator McCaskill said.
According to the President’s Fiscal Year 2014 Budget that was released last week, eliminating direct payments to farmers and agricultural businesses would reduce spending by $13.2 billion in the FY2014-2018 period. NTUF also applied half of the yearly amount of $1.65 billion to the current Fiscal Year, which we are halfway through, as specified in the bill.
This article was originally posted in the National Taxpayers Union Foundation’s Taxpayer’s Tab weekly newsletter on April 19, 2013. The Foundation’s BillTally project scores the potential spending of every introduced bill in Congress.
This post A bill to terminate agricultural direct payments beginning with the 2013 crop year, S. 334 originally appeared on Truth About Bills
2013-04-26 20:30:14
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