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Politics : Is Secession Doable? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (411)	11/5/2004 10:58:49 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1968

Re: How's your base gonna pay for it's CRACK? We'll cut off your "air supply"... you CRACKER: In the 1980s and 1990s By the 1980s, the cost to the government (and therefore taxpayers) of these [farm subsidies] sometimes exceeded $20,000 million annually. Outside of farm areas, many voters complained about the cost and expressed dismay that the federal government was actually paying farmers NOT to farm. Congress felt it had to change course again. In 1985, amid President Ronald Reagan's calls for smaller government generally, Congress enacted a new farm law designed to reduce farmers' dependence on government aid and to improve the international competitiveness of U.S. farm products. The law reduced support prices, and it idled 16 to 18 million hectares of environmentally sensitive cropland for 10 to 15 years. Although the 1985 law only modestly affected the government farm-assistance structure, improving economic times helped keep the subsidy totals down. As federal budget deficits ballooned throughout the late 1980s, however, Congress continued to look for ways to cut federal spending. In 1990, it approved legislation that encouraged farmers to plant crops for which they traditionally had not received deficiency payments, and it reduced the amount of land for which farmers could qualify for deficiency payments. The new law retained high and rigid price supports for certain commodities, and extensive government management of some farm commodity markets continued, however. That changed dramatically in 1996. A new Republican Congress, elected in 1994, sought to wean farmers from their reliance on government assistance. The Freedom-to-Farm Act dismantled the costliest price- and income-support programs and freed farmers to produce for global markets without restraints on how many crops they planted. Under the law, farmers would get fixed subsidy payments unrelated to market prices. The law also ordered that dairy price supports be phased out. These changes, a sharp break from the policies of the New Deal era, did not come easily. Congress sought to ease the transition by providing farmers $36,000 million in payments over seven years even though crop prices at the time were at high levels. Price supports for peanuts and sugar were kept, and those for soybeans, cotton, and rice were actually raised. Marketing orders for oranges and some other crops were little changed. Even with these political concessions to farmers, questions remained whether the less controlled system would endure. Under the new law, government supports would revert to the old system in 2002 unless Congress were to act to keep market prices and support payments decoupled. New dark clouds appeared by 1998, when demand for U.S. farm products slumped in important, financially distressed parts of Asia; farm exports fell sharply, and crop and livestock prices plunged. Farmers continued to try to boost their incomes by producing more, despite lower prices. In 1998 and again in 1999, Congress passed bailout laws that temporarily boosted farm subsidies the 1996 act had tried to phase out. Subsidies of $22,500 million in 1999 actually set a new record. [...] usinfo.state.gov