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Redstate...
Tax
Cuts
for the Rich – Bad; Subsidies – Good
Posted by
Daniel Horowitz
Barack
Obama and the Democrats have promised to make this election a turning
point in
the fight to make the rich “pay their fair share” of taxes. They are using biblical
innuendo to suggest
that it is immoral for the top 1% of earners (who happen to make 17% of
nation
AGI) to only pay 36.7% of the federal income taxes.
This is their hill to die on.
Accordingly,
one would expect Democrats to be the first ones to issue garrulous
protestations against farm handouts for the rich.
At present, more than 3/4 of farmers who earn
upwards of $250,000 a year receive subsidies from at least one farm
program. Farm
subsidies and crop insurance programs
help promote income inequality in farming by offering larger subsidies
to those
who already have larger farms. These
farmers can enjoy multimillion dollar insurance policies that are
subsidized in
order to guarantee their multimillion dollar investments that would
otherwise
not be supported by the free market.
Also, federal guarantees of bankers’ loans to
rich farmers have further
increased their borrowing capacity, thereby driving up the cost of land
acquisition. This,
in turn, has shut out
small farmers from the business, making it nearly impossible for them
to
compete.
It’s no
surprise that the number of individual farms has dramatically decreased
since
the inception of government-run agriculture.
According to the Heritage Foundation, the
number of farms has declined
from 6.8 million to 2.2 million since the Great Depression, despite the
fact
that the total acreage of farmland has only declined by 13%. The advent of mechanized
farm tools has
undoubtedly fueled the increase in large farms, but the government has
put the
nail in the coffin of the small family farm.
If there’s
one sphere of public policy in which there is inequality and
redistribution to
the rich, it is in agriculture. One
would expect the progressives to trip over themselves to eliminate
these
giveaways for the rich, right?
Wrong.
Yesterday,
Senator Rand Paul offered an amendment to deny access to farm programs
for
those with an AGI of over $250,000 annually.
Only 1 Democrat (Herb Kohl) in the entire
Senate voted for this
amendment. Sadly,
only 14 Republicans
voted for it either.
It seems
that Democrats will only oppose tax cuts but will continue to support
subsidies. After
all, it’s not about the
poor; it’s about creating government dependency for all constituents. Maybe we should just call
the Bush tax cuts
subsidies and then the Democrats will jump aboard.
One of
Reagan’s most incisive declarations was when he summed up government’s
view of
the economy like this: “If
it moves, tax
it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize
it.”
At some
point, we must stand up and tell our brethren in the farming community
that we
will not tax your family farm into oblivion upon your death; we will
not
regulate the size of your henhouse cages; however, we will not
subsidize you
either.
Read this
and other columns at Redstate
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