Amid Food Stamp Slash, Fat Cats Plunder Farm Subsidies

Less than a week after supplemental food assistance was slashed by $5 billion and as Congress debates deeper cuts to the federal food stamp program within a new five-year farm bill, a new report released Thursday highlights how billionaires continue to collect taxpayer-funded farm subsidies and may soon be eligible for even more.

According to the report Forbes Fat Cats Collect Taxpayer-Funded Farm Subsidies, authored by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), between 1995 and 2012 the federal government paid out $11.3 million to 50 billionaires or farm businesses in which they had an interest.

Though the billionaires’ subsidies amount to a relatively meager portion of the federal budget, the report notes that a number of these ‘Fat Cats’ are eligible for even greater payments through the crop insurance loophole.

Unlike farm subsidies, crop insurance premium subsidy recipients are legally non-disclosed. Further, crop insurance subsidies are not subject to payment limits, conservation requirements or means testing, which permits the denial of subsidies to individuals with a certain amount of annual off-farm income.

“The irony,” Scott Faber, EWG vice president for government affairs, told the New York Times, “is that farm subsidies are going to billionaires at the same time that there are proposals to kick three to five million people off of food stamps.”