Government is in the business of making itself larger that's all.

The department of grotesque payoffs

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

The US Department of Agriculture no longer serves as a lifeline to millions of struggling homestead farmers. In stead, it is a vast, self-perpetuating postmodern bureaucracy with an amorphous budget of some $130 billion -- a sum far greater than the nation's net farm income this year. In fact, the more the Agriculture Department has pontificated about family farmers, the more they've vanished -- comprising now only about 1 percent of the American population.

Net farm income is expected in 2011 to reach its highest levels in more than three decades, as a rapidly growing and food-short world increasingly looks to the United States to provide it everything from soybeans and wheat to beef and fruit. Yet the department this year will give a record $20 billion in various crop "supports" to the nation's wealthiest farmers -- with the richest 10 percent receiving over 70 percent.If farmers on their own are making handsome profits, why, with a $1.6 trillion annual federal deficit, is the USDA borrowing unprecedented amounts to subsidize them?

Some 70 percent of all subsidies go to corn, wheat, cotton, rice and soybean farmers. Most other farmers receive no federal cash. Yet somehow peach, melon and almond growers seem to be doing fine without government checks.

Then there is the more than $5 billion in ethanol subsidies that goes to the nation's corn farmers to divert their acreage to produce transportation fuel. That program has managed to cost the nation billions, to send worldwide corn prices sky-high and to distort global trade in ethanol at the expense of far cheaper sugarcane. While the Obama administration discourages new production of far cheaper fuels derived from natural gas, oil, shale oil and tar sands, it is borrowing billions to pay farmers to grow uncompetitive fuel.

About every 10 years or so, public outrage forces Congress to promise to curtail the subsidy programs. But when the deadline arrives, our elected officials always find a trendy excuse like "green energy" or "national security" to continue welfare to agribusiness.

Free-market conservatives don't dare touch the USDA, given the senatorial clout of Midwest farm states. Don't expect left-wing Democrats to object, either. In a brilliantly conceived devil's bargain, the USDA gives welfare to the wealthy while sending more than $70 billion to the lower income brackets in food stamps.

Originally, the food-stamp program focused on supplementing the income of only the poor and the disabled. But now eligibility is such that in 2011 it may achieve an all-time high in subsidizing 47 million Americans on food stamps -- nearly a sixth of the country.

If 30 years ago the public had sympathy for the strapped family who pulled out paper coupons to buy essentials like rice and bread at the checkout line, today it is often turned off by the now common spectacle in our superstores of plastic government credit cards being used for food purchases -- freeing up the shopper's cash for another basket of snacks, alcohol and other nonessential goods.

The USDA is now sending more than $1 billion to African-American farmers who sued the government, alleging past discrimination in federally subsidized farm-lending programs. But such understandable reparations are experiencing mission creep, as the number of would-be recipients claiming past discrimination far exceeds the number who actually farmed..

The multilayered USDA has no real misSion. Its vital functions such as crop reporting and forecasting, food inspection and scientific research are buried beneath politically driven cash transfers and could easily be farmed out to other agencies.

In these days of record federal deficits and unsustainable national debt, it is long past time to eliminate the department -- or least rename it "The Department of Food Subsidies."