About 10 percent of our people are unemployed, and millions more can get only part-time jobs.
The national debt is well over $12 trillion, and Congress has voted to allow it to grow to an obscene total of $14.3 trillion.
Interest on the debt is almost half a trillion dollars in President Barack Obama’s proposed budget.
Yet the Democrat-run Congress appears to have no interest in reducing the catastrophic spending.
That is obvious from recent news that even a modest attempt to rein in costly, unconstitutional farm subsidies is expected to be defeated in Congress. Farm state lawmakers have a lot of power, and many would be voted out of office if they did not continue to support government payments to farmers.
They do not put their backing of subsidies in those terms, of course.
“Like most subsidy backers, (Minnesota Democrat Rep. Collin) Peterson said … farmers need a safety net to protect their investments against unpredictable markets and weather,” The Associated Press reported.
That is an absurd excuse for subsidies, especially in this economy. Since about 10 percent of Americans are jobless, they obviously face “unpredictable markets,” and most of them are not guaranteed a federal subsidy to protect them from losing their jobs.
Farm subsidies are often defended as a way to help small family farmers. But between 2003 and 2006, more than 2,700 millionaires got farm subsidies. And 75 percent of the subsidies go to only 10 percent of the recipients.
That is corporate welfare that our nation simply cannot afford. It should be eliminated, not all at once, creating hardship for farmers, but over time.