SLIGHTLY UNDERHANDED POLITICAL IDEA OF THE DAY. The Washington Post reports today that the USDA makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year in farm subsidy payments to dead people. Prospect blogger Dean Baker points out that this is slightly overblown since the actual cost is about 52 cents a year to each American. Nonetheless, the whole affair gives me an idea for an underhanded political trick that could be used by opponents of farm subsidies. Why not take a page out the Republican play book and do our best to whip up a controversy about this along the lines of the hearings Republicans had about the IRS in the 1990s? Those hearings managed to convince many people that IRS agents were running amok -- throwing small children out of second-story windows and firebombing the homes of anyone who took an improper deduction. Resulting restrictions lowered enforcement of tax law and government revenues. Similarly, a hard, well-publicized, and perhaps slightly sensationalist investigation of USDA farm subsidies might lower the amount we pay to farmers, either by reducing fraud, or by imposing stricter standards for receiving farm aid. At the very least it would publicize further just how absurd farm subsides are. Best of all, as this article shows, unlike the Republican attack on the IRS, such a strategy would involve no lying. --Sam Boyd
