This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 14th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Farm Bill is an object lesson in expensive log rolling according to the Cato Institute's

Chris Edwards urban members of Congress are on board for the food stamps and

rural members are on board for the farm subsidies Edwards says it's time to get rid of most of it we spoke last week.

Give us a sense of just how large of an amalgamation the Farm Bill has become.

Well, Congress considers a new Farm Bill every five years or so, and 2018 is the year

that Congress is going to be addressing farm policy.

The last big farm bill was passed in 2014.

So while this big piece of legislation is called the farm bill,

it actually is a gigantic bill about $800 billion over 10 years that

includes farm subsidies, dozens of different farm programs, as well as the food stamp program which is a

70 billion dollar a year spending program. The basic idea here is log rolling

that if you had a standalone farm subsidy bill well farm state legislators would vote for it but

urban legislators would not if you had a standalone food stamp program the urban Democrats would vote for it standalone Food Stamp Program.

The Urban Democrats would vote for it, but nobody else.

So the idea here was to join together food stamps

and farm subsidies in a big giant omnibus bill and that way you can get

majority support in Congress. So what have we learned from the most recent farm

bill? So back in 1996 the Republicans had recently taken over a Congress for the first time in 40 years and they passed a landmark reform bill

The 1996 Freedom to Farm Act and moved toward free markets. It appeared that Republicans were going to finally at least reduce and maybe eliminate farm subsidies.

It passed then almost as soon as the ink was dry in that, Congress reverse course and started passing big spending

farm subsidy bills.

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