A marriage of convenience

IT’S A decades-old marriage of convenience in American politics, the union between Agribusiness and the Food Stamp program. Those two outfits may not have all that much else in common, but each has a great stake in continuing to milk the American taxpayer and consumer for their own benefit.

When the new Republican-dominated House of Representatives split up this cozy arrangement, both lobbies shed tears and issued cries of alarm. Not because the bill threatened their special interests, you understand, but because the divorce was not in the national interest, which both have long confused with their own.

This statement from the American Farm Bureau Federation pretty much sums up its public-spirited objections to any such split:

“The ‘marriage’ between nutrition and farm bill communities and our constituencies in developing and adopting comprehensive farm legislation has been an effective, balanced arrangement for decades that has worked to ensure all Americans and the nation benefits.”

To translate this piece of PR into Plain English: You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. There’s an even older saying, so old that every language must have a similar proverb: One hand washes the other. So that together, they can clean out the public treasury, too.

This latest attempt to split these two disparate but mutually profitable programs is likely to fail in the U.S. Senate, that sanctum sanctorum of special interests. Once cast into the outer darkness of that chamber, the House bill’s attempt to introduce a measure of common sense into government, not to mention economy, is surely doomed. For what is the public interest compared to the power of these special interests?

Nevertheless, the American people can be grateful to the House for even this gesture at good government.

Editorial, Pages 14 on 07/19/2013

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