By Phil Huber, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
We are told to worry about welfare. About people who lean too long on the public dollar, who need work requirements to nudge them off the rolls. So let me pose an uncomfortable question to my fellow taxpayers: If dependence on government checks is the measure, who in America is more on the dole right now—a family receiving food stamps, or a thousand-acre farming operation collecting a six-figure check with no income limit?
The numbers answer plainly. This year, direct federal payments to farmers are on track to reach roughly $55 billion—about a third of all farm income, the highest share of government support since 2001. A third. Let that settle. We are not talking about a modest safety net for hard times. We are talking about a sector in which one of every three dollars of income now arrives courtesy of the Treasury.
How did we get here? In no small part by self-inflicted wound. Tariffs raised costs and shut foreign buyers out of American markets, and so a parade of “bridge payments,” cotton bailouts, and specialty-crop aid was rolled out to soften a blow the government itself delivered. When a policy fails and the fix is a multibillion-dollar check, that is not a market correcting itself. That is taxpayers absorbing the cost of a mistake.
Now here is where the word “welfare” earns its keep—and where it falls apart. Welfare, as we normally use the term, means aid for those in need. It is means-tested. It flows down. Farm subsidies do the opposite. The top 10 percent of recipients collect about 65 percent of all commodity payments. The top 1 percent took home an average of more than $108,000 apiece, while the bottom 80 percent averaged $1,180—nearly a hundred to one. About 70 percent of crop-insurance and safety-net dollars go to the largest 10 percent of farms, fewer than 100,000 operations, each averaging well over $140,000 a year, owned by households far wealthier than the typical American family. There is no income cap on crop insurance. Even billionaires qualify.
This is not a liberal complaint. The Heritage Foundation has for two decades called farm subsidies “America’s largest corporate welfare program.” The Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute say the same. The aid does not chase need. It chases acreage and output, which means the biggest operations automatically collect the biggest checks.
And here is the part that should trouble anyone who claims to care about fairness. In the same recent budget law, Congress tightened work requirements and trimmed benefits for families on SNAP—actual food aid for actual poor people—while loosening the payment limits that let the largest, richest farmers collect even more. We made it harder for a struggling family to buy groceries and easier for a wealthy agribusiness to bank a six-figure subsidy. In the Farm Bill itself, nutrition assistance for the poor is roughly 80 percent of the spending, and farm programs about 20 percent. Yet it is the food-aid side, not the agribusiness side, that gets branded as the handout.
I say this as someone who respects farmers. The family operation working thin margins against weather and global prices deserves a genuine safety net, and many small growers get next to nothing from these programs. That is precisely the point. A system honestly built to protect struggling family farms would means-test its payments, cap them firmly, and aim them at the small and the vulnerable. Ours does the reverse. It is welfare turned upside down—generous to the strong, stingy to the weak, and dressed up in the language of rural virtue.
So, when someone next rails against welfare and the culture of dependence, ask which dependence they mean. Ask why a hungry child’s lunch is a moral hazard but a millionaire’s crop-insurance check is a sacred tradition. The new folks on welfare are not the ones we are told to resent. They are wealthier, better organized, and far better paid—and they have convinced us to call it something else.
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Phil Huber is a retired Army Reserve colonel, a federal civil servant, and a retired consultant who writes on civic education. He lives in Fredericksburg.
Once again, thank you Colonel.
Sharing this one.