Congress is a joke

Congress has long been a joke: 

• They routinely pass 1500-page bills that none of them have read;
• They give bills misleading titles, so that voters are mis-led into thinking a bill is intended to do one thing when in fact it would do exactly the opposite; 
• The Democrats pass bills that are financial disasters--because they spend trillions we don't have--in order to buy votes from uneducated voters who have zero understanding of finances;
• Republicans routinely cave to Democrat/socialist pressure and end up voting for disasters like immigration "reform" and expansion of entitlement programs;

Washington is said to be a world apart from the rest of the country. Politicians are generally a lot wealthier than the average American, and they don't seem to really know what they're doing--other than buying votes.

Which brings us to the 2014 "farm bill" just passed by the House.

This bill--which the senate is expected to pass easily--was a year overdue.  A farm bill is supposed to be thrashed out every five years, but congress couldn't agree a year ago, so they passed a one-year patch that kept the figures from the previous year.

The new bill commits to spending almost a trillion dollars--$957 Billion--over ten years.  I've seen several articles in mainstream media that don't say a word about the cost, and one or two that give a cost of about half the actual cost.

You may wonder how a major newspaper could get such a large figure so wrong.

It's a mystery.

Now unless you follow politics closely you probably think this huge sum will be spent on...farmers or farming.  And sure enough, a whopping $90 billion will go to "crop insurance," a good thing.  The government will use another $44 billion to price supports for favored commodities--a dumb idea because it distorts the market by rewarding people for producing more of certain foods than the market wants.

But by far the biggest line-item is for food stamps:  $756 Billion.

Why, you may ask, is the cost of food stamps included in the farm bill?

Because the farm bill is usually a "must-pass" bill, so liberals and RINOs know that no matter how much they increase the amount spent on the food stamp program, their colleagues will still pass the bill.

Clever.

But this year a few Republicans--concerned about the astronomical level of fraud in the food stamp program--announced they'd try to cut it by a few billion or so.

And amazingly the final bill does reduce spending on that program--by a whopping one percent.  So the GOP hands the Dems a campaign slogan ("Heartless Republicans cut your food stamps!!!!") in order to achieve a saving that amounts to a rounding error.

Smaht move, boys.