The U.S. farm price support program is a total mess. It gives the wrong incentives in all sorts of situations and it gives money to many of the wrong people. It would be great if it could be restructured. In fact, it would probably be a net gain if it were just eliminated. I said this just to be clear that I am not a defender or admirer of the farm program as it now exists. Nonetheless Bill Moyers segment on the farm bill being debated in Congress was a serious waste of PBS viewers' time. The piece followed Washington Post reporters who spent years tracking down wasteful payments. Why is this a problem? Many of the wasteful payments they tracked were numbers in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That might sound big to many people, but anyone who reports on the federal budget should know these are trivial sums. $1 million is equal to 0.00003 percent of federal spending. In some cases, the sums were accumulated over five or ten years, so divide that number by 5 or 10. It's great to crack down on wasteful federal spending, but viewers were being badly misinformed if they think that farm programs explain the budget deficit or that we can't afford to expand the food stamp program because of all the money we give to rich farmers, as the segment implied. Furthermore, there is so much corruption that the Washington Post (and probably Moyers) does not touch, which is so much larger and more pernicious. I'll just mention my two favorites. The pharmaceutical industry charges the public $240 billion a year for drugs that would probably sell for less than one-fifth as much if the drug industry didn't benefit from government imposed patent monopolies. Where are the stories that discuss the inefficiency and corruption of the archaic patent system of financing drug research? My other favorite for this occasion is the fund manager tax break, which allows hedge and equity fund managers to pay taxes at just the 15 percent capital gains rate, instead of the 35 percent rate for ordinary income. This allows many of the richest people in the country to pay taxes at a lower rate than teachers or firefighters. Mr. Moyers had one of these fund managers, Peter Peterson, on his show a few years back to tell PBS viewers that we have to cut Social Security and Medicare. Mr. Peterson has, by himself, probably gained several hundred million dollars from the fund managers' tax break. His personal take is probably more than the farm program abuses that the Washington Post reporters documented over the course of a year. If Moyers was really concerned about government waste and abuse, instead of giving Mr. Peterson a platform to make unanswered attacks on the country's most important social programs, he might have tried interrogating Mr. Peterson about whether it is the best use of public money to give multi-million dollar tax breaks to some of the very richest people in the country. I'm waiting for this show.
--Dean Baker