This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 10th,

2024. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Farm Bill is a mess.

That's not that controversial,

but it's hard to get a handle on the perverse impacts of several farm bill policies.

Paul Best, an investigative journalist at the Cato Institute, has looked into the curious and distorting policies and subsidized crop insurance and the very human impact.

This report is out today.

What does the Farm Bill give us?

Sure.

So the Farm Bill is a massive omnimus bill. Total costs are projected at about 1.5 trillion dollars over the coming decade.

And the spending can really be split into two main groups.

The first group is SNAP funding,

which is essentially food aid for low-income Americans.

And that actually makes up about 80% of the farm bill. The other 20% is what most people think of when they think of the farm bill, which is the various programs that subsidize the agriculture industry.

Now, these farm subsidies have

existed for a long time in America. The very first farm bill actually

started during the Great Depression. It was part of FDR's new deal. And farm subsidies have kind of morphed over time.

You know, at first when farmers were recovering

from the Dust Bowl, farmers were essentially paid

to take cropland out of production because they were trying to increase the price of commodities.

Over time that shifted to just direct payments for farmers regardless of their production or how much money they made.

Over time, you know, those direct payments were actually kind of shifted out of the farm bill in 2014 they were completely done away with and now as it

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