This year’s United States Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 (aka Farm Bill) has just passed both houses of Congress with veto-proof majorities.

The farm bill passed both the House and Senate last week with veto-proof majorities, 81 to 15 in the Senate and 318 to 106 in the House.

Because the bill contains huge subsidies for an already hugely profitable industry, foreign countries around the world are upset, even outraged. From the Malaysia Star:

New US Farm Bill will anger the world

The US Congress has just passed a new Farm Bill that continues the system of high subsidies even when food prices and farm profits are at record highs. It will incense the rest of the world.

LAST week, both Houses in the United States Congress passed a Farm Bill that continues the present system of high agricultural subsidies, rewarding big farmers that have already gotten much richer because of the recent hike in food prices.

This is a real pity, even a scandal, because the US farm subsidies are the main cause (together with the subsidies in Europe and Japan) of the greatest distortion in world trade.

The subsidies enable high-cost farmers and food companies to sell their products at below the cost of production and unfairly beat off the products of farmers in developing countries that don’t have the same kind of money to subsidise.

Many developing countries around the world have been importing artificially cheapened imported rice, wheat, corn, and chicken from the US and Europe.

Their own small farmers, which are often more efficient than those in the rich countries, have been displaced by these subsidised imports – one reason why agriculture has fallen in many developing countries, making them vulnerable to the present crisis of food shortages and high prices….

You can see their point. But the folk who really should be outraged are the US taxpayers. Those huge subsidies, amounting to an estimated $307 billion (easy math — $1000 for every man, woman, and child in the US), did not come from manna trees. They came from our pockets, courtesy of the sticky-fingered hand of the Internal Revenue Service dipping deep inside.

And the intent of these generous but non-essential gifts is not really to help the targeted farmers, who don’t really need any help. The bill is used to buy votes to preserve the incumbencies of the Senators serving on the influential Agriculture, Nutrition, & Forestry Committee:

• From the House, the bill includes 170 million dollars in cash assistance for Pacific coast salmon fishing, added by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA).
• Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) brings home expensive tax breaks and federal assistance programs for the Kentucky horse-breeding industry:
  

  McConnell included a tax break for horse owners that would benefit horse farms in his state of Kentucky. His office asserted that the provision, which ensures that all race horses are depreciated over three years for tax purposes, regardless of when the horses start training, did not qualify as an earmark because it would affect tens of thousands of taxpayers in nearly every state. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates this would cost $126 million over 10 years.

• Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) brought home the pork — a provision in the bill “that allows the federal government to sell portions of the Green Mountain National Forest to a ski resort in the state.” Leahy’s office said “that the provision, backed by the state and the Forest Service, would save the Forest Service management costs by selling land that has long been used for skiing.”

  The bill also has largesse for Vermont dairy farmers, the clean-up of Lake Champlain, and Vermont’s food banks and Food Stamp programs. HEY, WHAT ABOUT THE NUTRITION NEEDS OF THE POOR IN OTHER STATES?

• Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) got $175 million in funds to provide water for desert lakes in his state. Desert, lakes, ….HELLO?
• Sen. Max Baucus, (D-MT) won “a provision allowing state and local governments and non-profits to issue $500 million in tax-credit bonds to buy forest land for conservation purposes. The … provision would authorize the purchase of 400,000 acres of land in Montana from a single owner, the Plum Creek Timber Co.

  But let’s look at this a bit more closely.

  Plum Creek Timber (NYSE: PCL) is the largest private landowner in the United States. Most of its lands were originally purchased as timberland.

  Headquartered in Seattle, Plum Creek was spun off from Burlington Resources as a master limited partnership on June 8, 1989. It converted to a real estate investment trust on July 1, 1999.

  Burlington Resources was created from the Burlington Northern railroad’s natural resources holdings in 1988; Plum Creek Timber is therefore heir to the timberland originally granted by the federal government to the Northern Pacific Railway in the 1860s.

  So what this amounts to is allowing state and local governments to buy back land that the federal government gave away in the first place. When do the taxpayers cry RAPE? [See footnote.]

The House version of the Farm Bill (H.R. 2419) did not contain all these “earmarks,” which were largely added by the Senators of the Agriculture Committee for their own agendas.

Writing at Townhall, Congressman John Boehner sums it up:

Farm Bill Yet Another Example of Democrats’ Broken Promises on Earmark Reform

The Farm Bill has often been abused by politicians as a slush fund for bizarre earmarks and wasteful spending projects, and the latest version … is no different.

President Bush has threatened to veto this farm bill for its high lard content, but proponents appear to have a veto proof majority.

[Footnote] Related: The Last Best Place:  Max Baucus (D – Plum Creek Timber)

….this farm-bill provision offers a lesson on how things are sometimes done in Washington. Only one parcel of land in the entire United States meets the criteria set for the Qualified Forestry Bonds program. …. And that parcel is owned by the Plum Creek Timber Company, the single largest private landowner in the United States.

Plum Creek spent some $220,000 lobbying Congress in the first quarter of this year. Its PAC has spread $400,000 in campaign contributions between the parties in the last decade. PCL Employees have given $16,600 this cycle to Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance committee and the author of the bond provision….