New Article/"Million Dollar" Farms

“Million Dollar” Farmers
By Morgan

You may have heard recently that the House Agriculture Committee voted to ban federal subsidies for farmers making over $1 Million a year. Does this sound like the average income of a farmer to you? Those people whose job it is to put food on our plates? That’s probably because it isn’t. In fact, the average income of an American farmer is approximately 30-40 thousand dollars a year, keep in mind that your average manager of a retail store makes approximately $41, 434 a year (according to payscale.com). You might be wondering with the $1 million comes from, well there are two different incomes that you can look at, there is the Gross Income and then there’s the Net Income.

The Gross Income is your entire income, throughout the year, that adds up your entire income before deductions such as taxes, before any other deductions. The Net Income, on the other hand, is how much money you make AFTER taxes and other deductions. Is it very hard to see which income they seem to be going off of? I would say not.

It seems that ever since Vice President Al Gore, leftist politicians have wanted to stop agriculture in America. I mean, we’re amongst the most successful countries in the world, why should we need to eat? To provide jobs and food for our children?
There are many groups of people, politicians (the Bush administration amongst them) that say that Farm Subsidies need a bit of an overhaul. While this is true because millionaires, foreigners, people who don’t even have enough land or production to qualify as a commercial agricultural enterprise are amongst those getting a piece of the federal dollar pie; the subsidies don’t need to stop, they need to be fixed.

"It will do very little to make our agriculture policies more equitable, will not address the real challenges we face at the WTO, and it will not do anything to help our farmers produce for the market rather than for the government paycheck," said Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis.

I urge you all to write to your senators and your representatives to try and get something else. Wisconsin Democrat Ron Kind wrote a replacement for this. In his replacement he writes that rather than removing subsidies from farmers which will do the American and international economies no good, he proposes that the government implement subsidized saving bank accounts that farmers can utilize when crop prices are low or the yield is poor.

Mike Johanns, the Agriculture Secretary has been a large critic of the comity attempting to change farm policy. Southern crops such as cotton and rice are so expensive to produce farmers cannot do it without federal help.

New Article/Help! The Ice Is Falling!

Help! The Ice Is Falling!
By Morgan

According to major news sources, Al Gore, and National Geographic the world is warming to a point that is very beyond the norm, and this is causing enormous amounts of ice to break off from the main parts of the antarctic shelf, which in turn causes the ice on the mainland to melt as well. This is interesting considering the fact that rising water temperatures (largely caused by volcanic activity) are causing ice to melt from the bottom up, not rising atmospheric temperatures, what's also interesting to note is that, while it is reported to the average citizen that very large chunks are coming off the Antarctic peninsula, but what they don't report is the fact that the ice chunks that fall off very rarely only account for roughly 2% of all total ice on the continent, as well that it won't cause anything significant because the ice has already displaced all the water it is going to, melted or not. They also fail to note that in recent years we've had some of the coldest winters ever (people are still reeling from the heating bills!), and the falling snow easily replaces what is lost at the sea on the main land mass. Ice has been cooling and accumulating since the early 1970s. According to Michael S. Coffman, Ph.D, only 2.67% of the Wilkin's ice shelf and only .01% of the entire Antarctic continent, despite the media coverage of it using such powerful words as "collapse", and "explosion". Joseph D'Aleo former director of meteorology at the Weather Channel, and executive director of Icecap.us compared it to "an icicle falling from a snow and ice covered roof".

What else is interesting to note is that for every scientist that favored the IPCC conclusions in any way 792 scientists signed the petition saying that there is not any conclusive evidence for catastrophic man-made global warming. And for every Ph.D who believed it there were 1,800 who signed the petition.