Most Indiana representatives vote for farm bill
Gannett News Service
McLean, VA
May 14, 2008
by Maureen Groppe
WASHINGTON - Most Indiana lawmakers voted today for a $300 billion farm and nutrition bill that would expand food help for the poor but doesn't go as far as the White House wanted in limiting subsidies to wealthy farmers.
The 318-106 House vote was enough to override a threatened presidential veto.
Indiana's five House Democrats and GOP Reps. Steve Buyer and Mark Souder voted for the bill while GOP Reps. Dan Burton and Mike Pence opposed it.
"Indiana is agriculture," Pence said. "But Hoosiers on and off the farm also believe in fiscal discipline and reform."
Sen. Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican who has unsuccessfully pushed to overhaul the farm subsidy system, plans to oppose the bill when the Senate votes on it as early as Thursday. Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., has not said how he would vote.
The bill does not include a provision contained in an earlier version that would have forced Indiana to redraw its private contract for screening food stamp applicants.
The state had estimated it would have cost Indiana taxpayers about $125 million to break the state's contract with the IBM Coalition, which determines the eligibility of Hoosiers for food stamps, cash assistance, child care vouchers and Medicaid.
The five-year farm bill would expand nutrition aid for the poor, increase funding for conservation programs, and create a $4 billion disaster program for farmers buffeted by flood, drought or other weather damage.
The bill would also lower the amount of income a farmer can make and still collect farm subsidies. While current law allows those making more than $2.5 million a year to receive federal payments, the bill would cut off some subsidies for a farmer making more than $750,000 a year in farm-related income. Farmers making more than $500,000 in nonfarm-related income would not receive any payments.
The White House wanted to block payments to anyone making more than $200,000, and President Bush has threatened to veto the bill.
Bush said Congress is asking taxpayers to subsidize wealthy farmers at a time of record farm income.
Farm income is projected to reach a record $92.3 billion this year as strong demand, tight supplies and a growing biofuels sector push crop prices to historic highs.
Indiana farmers and landowners collected $229 million in direct payments last year, the eighth-largest among the states, according to the Environmental Working Group, which tracks federal farm payments.
More than 60 percent of federal subsidies nationwide went to 10 percent of recipients, according to the group.
Kent Yeager, director of public policy for the Indiana Farm Bureau, said the bill is good on balance and would make real reforms on payment limitations.
"It's the bill we have and it's the bill we've worked this hard to get to," Yeager said. "We know it's as good as we're going to get."
Advocates for the poor cheered the more than $10 billion increase in nutrition programs, although Bread for the World called the bill "half a loaf."
"We celebrate the important and urgent increases in nutrition funding," said president David Beckmann. "But we deeply lament the lack of serious reform of agricultural subsidies in this bill."
An estimated 204,000 low-income Hoosiers would benefit from the food stamp changes, increase in the emergency food assistance program and expansion of a fresh fruit and vegetable snack program, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The minimum benefit and standard deduction for the food stamp program, for example, would be raised and indexed for inflation.
