Hiding the money trail

Kansas City Star: Every few years Congress reauthorizes the nation’s lavish farm-subsidy programs. Just as regularly, the politicians vow to cut back payments to wealthy farmers.

But regrettably little ever changes.

The Environmental Working Group, a longtime advocate of a more reasonable distribution of farm aid, says 62 percent of the subsidy pot last year went to only 10 percent of the farmers. Those proportions have changed little in recent years.

Ken Cook, chief of the Environmental Working Group, says recipients “are well dug in.”

That’s for sure. What’s worse, in the last farm bill from 2008, Congress slipped in language that makes it tougher to follow the money trail.

Previously, Cook’s group could file freedom-of-information requests and learn which recipients got aid through business entities they had set up and how much they had received.

Fiscal situation

The time for writing the next farm bill won’t cycle around for a few more years. These programs should have been pared back long ago, and now the nation’s fiscal situation has radically worsened.

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