Feeding program fiasco
Dear Editor:
Perhaps the federal Farm Bill could have avoided that nasty “partisan rut” if the U. S. Dept. of Agriculture had stuck to its knittin’ instead of being transformed largely into one more of the federal government’s plethora of feeding programs for humans. In a rational world the Farm Bill would have been aimed at fostering the agricultural production industry through research and educational programs dealing with crop and livestock production, feed and food storage, processing and marketing; soil fertility, soil and water resource protection and conservation, and … you get the picture. AGRICULTURE! Has the term “Farm” also been stripped of objective meaning in the federal bureaucracy?
Instead, feeding and nutrition programs, for humans rather than farm animals, consume 84 percent of Farm Bill fiscal allocations! Why should a separate social welfare program, one of God only knows how many such there may be (this is, after all, a Big Government bureaucracy), be squirrelled away in a Farm Bill budget?
I demand that Reps. Simpson and Labrador call for an independent audit of these innumerable, overlapping, sloppily financed and sloppily operated non-farm livestock feeding programs. Who knows how many tens of millions of heavily borrowed public debt monies are being squandered, ostensibly in the interest of «doing good?» Often a Partisan Rut is precisely what a vastly over-extended nation-destroying budgetary fiasco needs.
–Leonard C. Johnson,
Moscow