Farm Bill Follies

Apparently the House f'ed up and left a big piece out of the farm bill when the President signed it. While at some level it's annoying that we're still applying an 18th-century standard of signing a piece of paper and all of the attendant papers having to be in a bundle, it's circumstances like this that led to Don Young slipping the Coconut Road earmark into the highway bill without it ever being voted upon. I'm sure they'll sort this out, but Republicans are using it as a way to cause mischief.

Meanwhile, I see a lot of liberal bloggers like Ezra Klein praising John McCain for his resistance to the pork-laden farm bill. And I agree to an extent, but the 2002 farm bill was much worse, and the consequence of not passing this one means that the funding levels of the old one remain in place. So McCain is essentially advocating for worse subsidies and a worse bill. In addition I don't believe that McCain's vision of agricultural policy is some sort of organic food-heavy, no-GM, end to all agribusiness kind of nirvana. He actually doesn't much care about agricultural policy, but he likes to bluster about any "wasteful spending" that isn't military spending so he can rail against the farm bill without articulating any broader strategy.

The farm bill sucks, and it is an example of power politics trumping sensible policy, but let's not kid ourselves that John McCain has some larger principle about agriculture - or anything at all about it - in his back pocket.