Cash on the Scarecrow, Pork on the Plow
Matt Welch | April 15, 2005, 2:09pm
John Cougar Mellencamp, as we know too well, was born in a small town. Seymour, Indiana, to be exact, population 20,000. The Coug is also the co-founder of Farm Aid, the 20-year-old annual concert to raise money and awareness for the beleaguered family farm. As he explained in an entertaining Washington Post profile last December,
"When Reagan was president, the way they treated the small family farm, running them out of business," he says. "How in the hell can a small family farm compete with the laws leaning toward corporate farming? What's the little guy going to do?"
Well, one option for "the little guy" -- including the little guy whose blood relative has sold 30 million records domestically -- is to gobble up hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars.
According to the good folks at the Environmental Working Group, who maintain an eminently searchable database of farm subsidies, there were 34 recipients with the last name of "Mellencamp" between 1995-2003. Of those, a full 22 come from the Hoosier State, including 12 in the small town of ... Seymour! Here's a list of Seymour's subsidized Mellencamps:
$383,673.00 James A. and Michael Mellencamp
$249,590.95 George Mellencamp
$157,219.56 David K. Mellencamp
$152,639.65 Mark Mellencamp
$152,424.00 Gary W. Mellencamp
$110,052.72 Mary Mellencamp
$46,172.47 Elsie Mellencamp
$30,527.87 Matthew Grover Mellencamp
$10,929.31 Frederick J. Mellencamp
$2,582.14 Jerry Ross Mellencamp
$1,015.00 Victor H. Mellencamp
$420.00 Andrew Mellencamp
That's $1.14 million for the small-town Mellencamps. Their other 10 subsidy-receiving Indiana namesakes, incidentally, farm within a 50 mile radius of Seymour. Like most Indianans, the bulk of the Mellencamps' hand-outs come in the form of corn subsidies.
Brad | April 16, 2005, 3:33pm | #
Unfortunately, I had to run and catch a train as I was typing my first post, so I wasn't able to finish my thoughts. I agree with what you guys have said in response to my first post -- it's a bit of a circular game in terms of what effects subsidies have on food prices.
I think one of the earlier posts hit the nail on the head: subsidies ARE so very French. Unfortunately, because so much of Europe (and Canada as well, I believe) have such high subsidies for their producers, in addition to the limitations on free trade from virtually every country, it throws the entire world's commodity markets out of whack. It seems that the rationale to keep subsidies in the U.S. is to allow the U.S. farms to stay in business who might otherwise fail to the unfair conditions they face as compared to the rest of the world.
The ideal answer is to convince the whole world to abandon the subsidies, let natural competitive pressures reward those farms that produce the most efficiently, and let the ag product prices float naturally.
As to what programs are currently in place, I really haven't kept up on it. I do know that there used to be payments to set aside land and not farm it, but I'm not sure if those still exist today. One part that is still around is the CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) that pays farmers to return highly erodable land to grass. This program is the darling of nature and environmental groups, so the purpose of that one is two-fold. I guess the main thrust of my first post is that many of the programs do encourage farmers to produce a crop (or at least seed it) even if the present economics, sans government assistance, tells a person that you will lose money on it. It always keeps farms in business that otherwise would fail. I do think that, on average, these programs have artificially boosted the production of many ag products in this country, which have the effect of artificially lowering prices. Milk prices were mentioned, and although I know next to nothing about that industry, it was my impression that those programs are a simple artificial price setting by a government body as opposed to any kind of government subsidy to a farmer. Anytime a subsidy is paid to a farmer, with the exception of paying them NOT to grow anything, it will likely encourage the production of excessive products and lower prices.
For full disclosure, my parents are farmers/ranchers, but themselves got tired of the notion of being essentially welfare recipients. They said that the portion of their income from government payments got to be embarrasing (although they needed them to not go broke). With the rise in cattle prices, they decided to seed their entire place into grass and get out of farming completely. Now they are in an industry that survives with no government assistance of any kind (at the producer level, anyway), and they feel a lot better about that.
