Bush's Agricultural Policy

You may be wondering why Bush is coming out against agricultural subsidies, thus alienating some of his core constituencies, especially in the cotton and soybean states of the South. What is the political capital he would gain out of this?

I think the answer is that this is a presidency rather unconcerned with traditional notions of politics. Like everything else over the last 4+ years, this attack against subsidies comes out of ideology. In the first term, Bush put into motion the first two parts of the radical Republican agenda: eviscerating the tax code and a neoconservative foreign policy. Now that they have been reelected, it's time to focus on the third and most difficult task: turning domestic policy back to the Gilded Age. The Social Security "reform" is part of this. Although there is no crisis in Social Security, one has been invented because the ultimate goal of this administration is to get government out of our economic lives, regardless of the consequences. Social Security was part of the New Deal safety net. Agricultural subsidies were too. In order to raise prices during the Great Depression, one of the first acts of the Roosevelt administration was to create the Agricultural Adjustment Agency (AAA). This established such policies as paying for farmers to plow under their fields which turned into more direct forms of subsidies.

For this ideologically driven administration, AAA was a bad thing and its remnants must be eliminated. This is the core of Bush attacking agricultural subsidies. If Bush is successful with blowing up Social Security and to a lesser extent with this new agricultural policies, you can expect further repeals of New Deal and even Progressive legislation. Among the possible ideas brewing in the right-wing "think"tanks are privatizing National Park sites and eliminating the minimum wage.

I can already see the Worker Freedom Act in Congress that will allow workers to "negotiate" their wage with their employer without government interference.