Two Republican lawmakers this week expressed concern that the 2018 farm bill will cause an over-reliance on government support and hurt taxpayers, The Daily Signal reports.
"By subsidizing crops, subsidizing the insurance of these crops, we end up with surpluses of one commodity at the expense of a shortage of other crops that should have and could have and would have been planted but weren’t because government masked the signals that market consumers were sending to those producers,” Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., said Tuesday at an event at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
A Heritage Foundation researcher, Daren Bakst, released a report in March claiming that the $867 billion bill will cost taxpayers $15 billion per year on safety net programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP.
"Because these signals are no longer being sent from consumers but are being sent by government, it shouldn’t surprise us that individuals with over-sized influence in government make out very well," McClintock said this week.
Rep. Ralph Norman, R-SC, also expressed his concerns about the farm bill at the event. Although both he and McClintock came out in support of some of the changes made to SNAP, they both criticized the program and other parts of the legislation.
"The measure does make some improvements in SNAP, namely limiting categorical eligibility to those actually receiving benefits in other programs and extending the work requirement to able-bodied adults. … But it does nothing to limit SNAP to basic food commodities and opts instead to pay bonuses for fruits and vegetables while continuing to fund purchases of junk foods,” McClintock said.
"The committee passed bills that created new loopholes that make it easier for those wealthy farmers to receive subsidies while at the same time rolling back commonsense limits and means testing,” Norman said.