Budget watchdog, all federal — Episode 22: The Farm Bill with special guest Dr. Joe Glauber (Taxpayer’s for Commonsense) 

Taxpayer’s for Commonsense produced a podcast with senior research fellow Joseph Glauber. Glauber talked about various parts of the Farm Bill, social protection, and crop insurance. Some of his comments included, “The farm bills have been around for a long, long time. We go back to the early 1930s with all the New Deal legislation that was passed in that decade.” We still have farm bills. In fact, they’ve grown to be quite large. Every five or so years Congress comes back, debates, and passes a piece of farm legislation known as the farm bill and it’s grown a lot rather than just covering specific commodities or various things dealing with the agricultural sector. It also has a lot of conservation programs, has a lot of general programs on rural development, research and development and it’s the largest component of the nutrition programs. Things like the SNAP program, and the old Food Stamps Program. “I think if you’re going to be providing federal dollars in terms of subsidy support, then you should be also getting some other public benefits out of it. I think there, you should be thinking about environmental compliance, other sorts of things that we’ve been talking about here.”