Never Underestimate the Creative Excuses....

Your Government Can Find for Taking Your Money.

Today's topic is Free Trade. National Review's Media Blog is a fertile source for information. You can just go over there and start reading. I'll share a few excerpts here. Understand that I am not an uninterested observer. We aren't farmers, but we do lease some of our land to farmers, and those farmers do get farm subsidies. The money from the land lease is roughly 5 percent of our annual income, so it's not insignificant, but I don't think we'll starve without it.

We're going to talk cotton. American cotton growers are subsidized. African cotton growers are not. Because of those subsidies, American growers can sell their products below cost. Furthermore, we place duties and quota restrictions on the African market. "In order to help its least-developed members, the WTO is considering a proposal to remove all quotas and duties from products coming from least-developed countries (LDCs)." So long as American cotton is subsidized this really doesn't offer any effective solution to the African cotton producers, but it might look pretty on paper.

Africans are not stupid, so they have explained that they would prefer that we stop subsidizing our cotton growers so that the playing field is created by the market, rather than by the government. The Media Blog offers a short mulitple choice quiz, and we find those irresistable. So here we are:

How do you think the U.S. responded?

A) They agreed that U.S. cotton subsidies are egregiously high and offered to make substantial reductions, leading to a zeroing out in the near future.

B) They offered to subsidize West African cotton farmers also.

If you guessed B, you've been paying attention. Here's what U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns said about the issue today:

About a month ago, [U.S. Trade Representative Rob] Portman and I went to Burkina Faso where we launched a West Africa Cotton Improvement Program. This program will strengthen Western African private sector organizations, link United States and West African agricultural research, reduce soil erosion, establish a ginning school, and improve the quality of cotton through better technology.

But fundamentally what will best meet the needs of the West African countries, in the end, is an ambitious outcome in these agricultural negotiations, such as what we proposed in October. I believe that we all recognize this and I have to tell you that the world has applauded our proposal. We have proposed to end all export subsidies and implement new disciplines on export credit programs.
As I mentioned at the top of this post, the U.S. has no export subsidies to eliminate. Also, its export credit programs have already been reformed — the WTO made us reform them after we lost a dispute with Brazil.

So, in sum: We propose to eliminate two subsidy programs we don't have, leave our current subsidies pretty much intact and add a new subsidy program for West African farmers.

There is more at the link. You can read it all, but you might want a tissue. Use a dollar bill or two- you might as well get some use out of them before Uncle Sam takes them from you and gives them away to somebody else.