Expecting More, Committing Less 9 As the 201 Farm Bill was being written, federal deficits were at
record highs and public sentiment was boiling over. Wealthy absentee
landowners living in New York City, Washington, DC, Atlanta, and
other cities, it turned out, had been receiving millions of dollars in direct
payments dating back to 199 . Under intense public scrutiny, politicians
promised that such payments would be stopped.
But Congress had already put in place a plan to maneuver around pub-
lic outrage. To make it easier for congressional members to defend their
actions with constituents back home, food assistance for low-income
households had been rolled into farm bill legislation four decades earlier.
After two years of lobbying by more than six hundred organizations
(from Fortune 00 companies in banking and oil to nonprofits working
to end global hunger) that collectively spent more than a half billion
dollars, the new farm bill was ready.
The 19 Farm Bill was 2 pages. The 201 Farm Bill came in at 09
pages. The estimated cost to taxpayers was $ 9 billion, or $ 00 mil-
lion per page. Financial assistance for low-income households ac-
counted for 0 percent (a topic to be taken up in chapter 11 ). But direct
payments did not totally disappear. As if borrowing a page from the
past, the bill’s authors labeled the remaining direct payments “transi-
tion assistance.” But in this latest twist to a long history of twists, new
types and levels of subsidized insurance were offered to farmers at
unprecedented levels.
Offering insurance to farmers was nothing new, but coverage had been
limited to select crops like wheat and extreme weather events such as
hail. Because many farmers had been unwilling to pay for insurance, the
government was subsidizing their payments under the rationale that
underwriting premiums was less costly to taxpayers than federal bailouts
following a weather-related catastrophe.
Overseeing insurance has not proven to be the government’s strong
suit. At one time, for every one dollar sent to farmers, insurance com-
panies were receiving an additional dollar. Taxpayers were better off
giving farmers free insurance. The private insurance companies
the government uses were making a killing; from 199 to 201 , their