This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 31st,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. The twice a decade farm bill is huge.

It's getting larger and as you might expect it's full of handouts that have

little directly to do with agriculture. Cato's Chris Edwards discusses the cross-purposes in government programs aimed at getting Americans to eat healthier, and programs

meant to subsidize low-income food purchases.

People don't look at the farm bill as closely as you do. So for those who are broadly ignorant and

rationally so of all of the details of the Farm Bill, what is it? It's every

five years, but what's in it?

Every five years, Congress reauthorizes what's called the Farm Bill, but that's a bit of a

misnomer because the Farm Bill includes dozens of farm subsidy programs, programs that have

been around since the 1930s, but the Farm Bill these days also includes the SNAP or food stamp Program, which is actually the biggest part of the bill.

So we spend this year, we will spend taxpayers that is, we'll spend $140 billion on the food stamp program an enormous amount of money.

So Congress needs to reauthorize food stamps and I think Congress should reconsider the food stamp program that's far too expensive and the results are very poor.

And one particular element of that food stamps snap broadly, the same thing, is that to the extent that the federal government is concerned

about problems like obesity, to the extent that the federal government is concerned about low-income people having

access to healthier food the money that is included in this program you didn't spend

that on anything you want essentially.

The state of nutrition has entirely changed since the government first passed the food stamp program in 1964.

Back then, there was a substantial problem of low-income people not getting enough to eat.

The problem was not enough calories.

Today that's entirely changed.

Obesity has become a gigantic problem in America.

...