As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your representative and urge him or her to vote NO on H.R. 1947, the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management (FARRM) Act. Although this bill is popularly known as the “Farm Bill”, eighty percent of the bill’s spending goes to food stamps, and much of the rest goes to subsidize large farm corporations at the expense of small family farms.
The first and most obvious reason to oppose this bill is that it spends close to a trillion dollars over ten years. Although the Congressional Budget Office has scored this House version of the bill at $939 billion, past farm bills have always greatly exceeded their cost analysis, and this one will certainly do so.
The “Farm Bill” is a misnomer for a bill which is 80 percent food stamps. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP, the government name for food stamps) has increased its enrollment over 70 percent just since 2008, and now accounts for over $800 billion in spending over ten years. Riddled with inefficiencies and fraud, the SNAP program desperately needs structural reform. Instead, it is tucked away in the farm bill, as an $800 billion earmark used to get urban Democrats to vote for the agricultural subsidies in the rest of the bill.
Finally on top of all the corporate welfare in the farm bill already, Republicans in the House have piled on a brand new entitlement program, shallow loss crop insurance. This new program would give farmers, who already receive massive subsidies on insurance coverage for catastrophic crop loss, more subsidies to protect against just making less revenue than the previous several years’ average. This essentially locks farmers into the current record-high revenues for years, even after crops inevitably fall back to average price levels.
I urge you to call your representative and ask him or her to vote NO on the farm bill, H.R. 1947. We will count their vote as a KEY VOTE when calculating the FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2013. The Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the FreedomFighter Award, which recognizes Members of Congress with voting records that support economic freedom.
Sincerely,
Matt Kibbe
President and CEO
FreedomWorks
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