Don’t Shoot the Messenger

I'm sorry to bring bad tidings so close to the weekend, but apparently House and Senate conferees have reached agreement [$] on the broad outlines of a Farm Bill.

We will have to wait until Monday to get the full, disgusting details but broadly, we know this about the proposed bill:

• it will raise the target prices and loan rates for northern crops (i.e., wheat, soybeans, other feedgrains) beginning in 2010
• raise the sugar loan rate three-quarters of a cent
• include a sugar-to-ethanol program (whereby the USDA would buy sugar that would otherwise threaten the domestic minimum price and sell it, presumably at a loss, to ethanol plants)
• an additional $4 billion for conservation programs
• $10.361 billion extra for domestic and international food aid programs
• The bill also includes the new "permanent" disaster program (some thoughts on that here), albeit at $250 million less than the original $4 billion request

To pay for this, your representatives in Congress cut the $5.2 billion per year direct payments program (that is the program that pays farmers on the basis of past production and yields, regardless of what they produce now) by 2 percent per year for four years. Recall that the direct payments program, while an offence to taxpayers everywhere, is at least less trade distorting than the price-linked subsidies that the conferees have agreed to increase. And in the final year, when it really counts for purposes of planning future spending levels (i.e., the baseline), the direct payments will go back up again.

The one possible bright light at the end of this sewer-pipe: a presidential veto. No word from the administration on this latest deal, but it does not fit their past definition of an acceptable amount of reform and thus, assuming intestinal fortitude on the part of President Bush (I know, I know), would likely elicit a veto threat.

Happy weekend, everybody.