Efficiency And Progress Are Ours Once More

Sallie James on House Republicans' spending priorities:

The administration's proposal would affect only about 2 percent of the total recipients of direct payments — subsidies that flow every year regardless of prices or farm output to owners of land that may or may not still be used for farming — and it does not by any means go far enough. But at least it is a start.

On the other side of the aisle, the Republicans followed their Republican Study Committee colleagues in failing to propose any cuts to "farm subsidies" as we typically understand them in their FY2011 budget proposal. To be sure, 22 percent of the $60 billion in cuts they propose would come from the "agriculture function," and they indeed get rid of entire programs, but they are mainly to the nutrition and conservation areas of the USDA's responsibilities. Nothing, so far as I can tell, from the commodity programs.

Money for rich landowners, but not enough for poor kids. It's a problem of bad morals.