Washington’s Soviet-style Central Planning

The U.S. House Agriculture Committee has reported out, and the full House will soon consider a new Five Year Plan.

If that sounds like something the former Soviet Union commonly did, that’s because it pretty much is.

Congress emulates the Soviet Politburo even though the latter planned so successfully that nearly all the foodstuffs and commodities Americans take for granted were in short supply or unavailable in the USSR. Tinkering in markets is a fool’s game, but Washington never runs short of fools.

The Ag Committee, which has legislative jurisdiction over agriculture, food, rural development and forestry, calls their plan the “Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026” (FFNSA), a/k/a, a farm bill. Like Soviet plans, U.S. farm bills are typically enacted for five years.

The new bill “renews and enhances crop insurance, disaster assistance, risk management programs, loans for farmers, and federal agricultural research.”

Sounds good, right?

But, farm benefits usually make up only about 20 percent of the bill’s cost. The majority of the FFNSA’s $1.3 trillion (over five years) spending will be for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better-known as food stamps, one of America’s most fraud-prone programs.

Aside from SNAP, farm bills are primarily taxpayer- and consumer-funded corporate welfare for politically-connected ag-related interests.

Non-farming Americans tend to be nostalgic about “family farms,” and think farm bills preserve them. That’s seldom true. Most farm benefits go to giant agri-businesses rather than small family farms. Historically, about a third of crop price supports go to the largest, wealthiest four percent of farm businesses. Eighty percent of farms nationwide share about one-tenth of benefits.

In fact, farm commodity price protections and, especially, corn prices driven by the ethanol fuel mandate, encourage larger farm operations to harvest greater federal benefits by purchasing family farms. American farm policy has driven up the price of farmland, and made farming careers less accessible to young farmers.

Corporate agriculture aside, farm household incomes are generally 25 percent higher than the average U.S. household income, so farm subsidies also amount to welfare for farm families who are comparatively well off.

But, nothing in American farm programs more closely parallels Soviet central planning than sugar policy.

The sugar program, favored by the American Sugar Alliance, an industry shill, rewards politically-generous sugar producers and refiners by limiting the domestic supply of sugar, guaranteeing producers a minimum price, and restricting imports. Sugar price supports and import limits waste taxpayer dollars, raise food prices, kill confectioners’ jobs and limit opportunities for small cane farmers in poor countries.

For decades, sugar policy has made American consumers and confectioners pay two to three times the world price for sugar. Although sugar-producing crops aren’t grown or refined here, Pennsylvania has been affected.

Pennsylvania lost thousands of well-paying Hershey Company jobs, first to Canada and then Mexico where the company is able to access the world price for sugar, a primary ingredient in Hershey’s products. In fact, the maker of LifeSavers candies was candid about exporting jobs for lower sugar prices.

Farm bills are a prime example of legislative “log-rolling,” or vote trading.

Years ago, farm-state legislators, eager to protect agricultural subsidies, added SNAP funding to farm legislation, linking rural entitlements to urban legislators’ public welfare interests. The coalitions feared that separate congressional votes on SNAP and farm policy would eventually force reforms to both, so they created an overwhelming voting bloc that was powerful enough to overturn a 2008 presidential farm bill veto.

Farm commodity price supports are hidden taxes on every American food buyer, ironically including the needy SNAP recipients farm bills purport to assist.

Earlier farm bills also permitted benefits to tangential associates of the bill’s primary beneficiaries by allowing a farmer’s cousins, nieces and nephews to receive subsidies, regardless of whether they lived or worked on the farm. Separate provisions waived means tests for some corporate farms, allowing billionaires to receive farm subsidies.

It’s a symbiotic relationship: Big Agriculture dispenses lots of campaign cash; both Democrats and Republicans harvest the lucre.

Unsurprisingly, the American Farm Bureau Federation “urges House leaders to continue the momentum and bring this important legislation [FFNSA] to a vote on the floor.”

Washington politicians tout every farm bill as an example of how the parties can work together, while omitting that, every day, their “cooperation” shafts American consumers and taxpayers.

https://www.pottsmerc.com/2026/03/15/jerry-shenk-washingtons-soviet-style-central-planning/