At the March meeting of the Peoria County Board, Dist. 14 Board member Brian Elsasser wore a white striped tie and light purple shirt, a natty complement to his customary two-piece black suit, attire befitting a prosperous business man; veteran Dist. 15 Board member Carol Trumpe has a modest necklace accessorizing her colorful jacket, her wire-rim glasses framing a friendly face; Dist. 16 Board member Brad Harding comes in a bit late in jeans and a flannel shirt, balancing a plate of cheese and fruit.
All three are conservative Republicans.
They also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in government assistance in the last 18 years.
They’re farmers.
None sees a contradiction in receiving taxpayers funds while identifying so closely with the GOP, which has criticized such “”entitlements,” from farm subsidies and food stamps to Medicaid and tax breaks for profitable oil companies.
“All politicians must speak carefully and think through their policy positions,’’ comments Illinois politician Adam Andrzejewski, who was endorsed by Rush Limbaugh and some Tea Party elements in the 2010 GOP primary for Governor.
“How can you cut welfare benefits to poor people if you take thousands of dollars in farm aid – when land prices approach $10,000 an acre or more?” adds Andrzejewski, the founder of For The Good of Illinois and the transparency website, OpenTheBooks.com. “We’ve uncovered tens of billions of dollars in direct giveaways to the Fortune 100, Small Business Administration loan abuse to private country clubs and wealthy entities, farm subsidies to millionaires. Subsidies at every level are too lucrative and need to be prudently scaled back to reasonable levels.”
In the last 18 years, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the non-partisan, non-profit Environmental Working Group, Carol and husband Richard Trumpe received more than $72,000; Harding received more than $152,000; and Elsasser Farms, Inc., owned with relatives, received more than $827,000. (Other subsidies were apparently paid out to other family members, but they’re separate transactions.)
Such subsidies aren’t improper nor handouts, exactly.
“I think a lot of the complaints come from outside the Farm Belt,” Elsasser says. Farm “subsidies aren’t like unemployment or food stamps – and I’m not pleased with the growth in food stamps.”
Harding agrees.
“I – along with most central Illinois farmers – no longer receive direct farm subsidy payments,” Harding says. “Thankfully, market prices have risen above the minimum trigger prices for our Food Security Safety Net program. That said, farms that enroll in and abide by the current guidelines, established to ensure a safe and stable domestic food supply, receive a discount on their federal crop insurance premiums.”
Everyday people don’t understand how 21st century agriculture works, Trumpe says.
“Most people have lost touch with all that’s entailed with agriculture,” she says. “There are so many factors: herbicides, pesticides, equipment prices. And if you lose a crop, there’s no backup.
“Some conservatives don’t want to fund anything, regardless,” she adds.
Government assistance to farmers can be complicated, according to Traci Bruckner of the Center for Rural Affairs.
“The controversial Direct Payment program was replaced by Title I’s Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC),” she says. “Farmers have to choose one. Those help farmers recover from downturns in prices or loss of revenue. They don’t pay premiums for those.”
Elsasser stresses federal Crop Insurance.
“There’s hardly a farmer I know who doesn’t support crop insurance,” he says. “There’s hardly a farm community I know that doesn’t support crop insurance. Farmers pay premiums and most pay more in premiums than is received in claims. It protects against disasters and market forces.”
However, a new report from the University of Illinois demonstrates that various crop insurance programs could result not in the promised $5 billion annual savings, but even larger payments than the discredited direct payments system.
Still, maybe a lack of understanding about farming – or about government assistance to agribusiness – is less the issue than the entitlement going to some people affiliated with a political party opposing them.
“The idea that farmers have an ‘entitlement’ seems a bit off the mark,” Harding says. “Suffice it to say the government programs my father grew up on – where we paid farmers NOT to grow food, feed, fuel and fiber – are a thing of the past. And once we explain how the current farm programs are designed to stabilize price and supply to benefit the average consumer, most agree the program benefits are important for food security and price predictability.”
However, “entitlement” is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “a government program guaranteeing access to some benefit by members of a specific group and based on established rights or by legislation.” The government’s definition is that an entitlement “legally obligates the United States to make payments to any person who meets the eligibility requirements established in the statute that creates the entitlement.”
Further, rather than food staples, the USDA says that many crops are used for making fuel, plastics, fibers/clothing, sweeteners for soft drinks, candy and so on, cosmetics, oils, animal feed and pharmaceuticals.
“The farm program is a long way from its core mission of ‘ensuring a stable food supply and protecting the family farm,’” says Andrzejewski, who’s written about the issue for Forbes magazine. “Those two objectives have a public purpose. The recent Farm Bill decreases transparency and increases the total dollar aid.”
Politically – despite more than 90 percent of entitlement benefits going to elderly, disabled or working households, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – the GOP’s position on government assistance has become one of suspicion or even resentment, what the Associated Press in 2013 saw as “growing Republican opposition to farm subsidies.”
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Diane Katz called farm subsidies “the nation’s corporate welfare program, the costs of which burden taxpayers and increase food prices.” Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma in 2011 issued a report, “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous,” that determined that $316 million in farm subsidies between 2002 and 2009 had been paid to millionaires. And today, there’s a bipartisan measure in the Senate seeking to limit the amount of federal crop insurance premium subsidies producers can receive.
Nevertheless, the USDA still has substantial protections for farmers, says the Center for Rural Affairs’ Bruckner, who mentioned loan and conservation programs plus energy-crop programs and those ARC and PLC safeguards against market fluctuations. But when does a safety net become a crutch?
Three years ago, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney commented, “Government dependency only fosters passivity and sloth.”
For his part, Elsasser says he doesn’t oppose food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP).
“I’m not critical of food stamps for the truly needy,” he says. “I want them to have the basic staples. [But] there’s probably some abuse. I wouldn’t oppose drug testing for government payments.”
Another Republican, former lawmaker Jim Nowlan of Toulon, Ill., says that agribusiness lobbyists such as the Farm Bureau have been effective in protecting government assistance and portraying the sector in idyllic terms.
“I’m guessing the American farmer feels entitled,” Nowlan says. “Agribusiness senses itself as almost a fourth branch of government, the inheritor of the Jeffersonian tradition, of goodness and strength, of a way of life worthy of being sustained. But it’s one that’s not sustained for everyone, but for fewer and fewer people.
“Farm subsidies date back to the 1930s and the New Deal, when the country started Social Security to provide for older Americans and the Rural Electrification Administration to facilitate bringing power to rural areas,” Nowlan continues. “Government by its nature redistributes wealth, whether it’s the mortgage deduction or the Ex/Im [Export/Import] Bank.
“Another one,” he adds. “You and I pay property taxes based on an assessed value that is 33 percent of the market value of our property, as best can be determined by the assessor. Since the 1980s or so, farmland has been assessed on a non-market value basis that factors in the productivity of the land, prices and the cost of borrowing. Guess what percentage of market value the farmland assessed valuation represents? About 2 percent! So guys with farmland worth $15,000 an acre pay about $25-30 an acre in property taxes, and this low taxation simply shifts the burden of taxation to you and me. If farmland were taxed more, then tax rates would be lower for all of us.
“And this low cost of a business input (the taxation), along with the subsidies, increase the value of the farmland!” Nowlan says.
Members of both political parties participate in farm subsidies, of course. Although no other Peoria County Board member is listed as having received any farm subsidies, Harding – whose personal operation has received no federal farm subsidy since 2006 – in the last election defeated Democrat Dick Burns, who’s received $21,770 since 1995.
“Whether we are discussing Social Security or the Earned Income [Tax] Credit, well-intentioned bureaucrats try to interpret and implement policy decisions crafted by elected officials with the lofty credentials of ‘one vote more than my opponent,’” Harding says.
Nowlan sees a dramatic change within his Republican Party.
“There’s the Main Street Republican, the Chamber of Commerce type and then there’s this Tea Party/Libertarian wing, and they see the world quite differently. Plus, I guess social conservatives would be another strain.”
“What’s happening is that conservative farmers are being tarred by the same brush many of them are tarring others.”
Andrzejewski says openness is key.
“Politicians must disclose their personal government subsidies,” he says. “The people need to know the conflicts of interest. With $18 trillion in long-term national debt, extreme subsidies cannot be tolerated by either party establishment. There’s no money left and the people are spent.”
Andrzejewski’s use of the term establishment is one clue to the schism within the GOP about government assistance.
“The real split in the Republican Party has always been the reformers versus the establishment,” Andrzejewski says. “For far too long, the establishment has coddled insiders with a history of patronage contracts to friends.”
Harding disagrees, attributing differences to another division.
“Paul Rosenbohm [Republican Board member from Dist. 18] has said many times our differences do not stem from an ‘R’ versus a ‘D’ but a Rural versus Urban perspective,” Harding says. “I agree.”
Andrzejewski disputes that.
“Many farmers across the state tell me that they hate government involvement in their industry,” he says. “But, how do you unwind the billions of dollars of government subsidies driving the entire business?”