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.