A Reminder

Republicans aren’t any better about being hypocrites than Democrats, and they all love the state, they just disagree on how to (ab)use it’s power.

According to the organization’s records, Bachmann’s family farm received $251,973 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2006. The farm had been managed by Bachmann’s recently deceased father-in-law and took in roughly $20,000 in 2006 and $28,000 in 2005, with the bulk of the subsidies going to dairy and corn. Both dairy and corn are heavily subsidized—or “socialized”—businesses in America (in 2005 alone, Washington spent $4.8 billion propping up corn prices) and are subject to strict government price controls. These subsidies are at the heart of America’s bizarre planned agricultural economy and as far away from Michele Bachmann’s free-market dream world as Cuba’s free medical system.

And…

Chuck Grassley, the longtime Republican senator from Iowa who warns his constituents of Obama’s “trend toward socialism,” has seen his family collect $1 million in federal handouts over an 11-year period, with Grassley’s son receiving $699,248 and the senator himself pocketing $238,974. Even Grassley’s grandson is learning to ride through life on training wheels, snagging $5,964 in 2005 and $2,363 in 2006. In the Grassley family they learn early how to enjoy other people’s money.

They conclude, more or less rightfully

Farm subsidies have become so corrupt that payments sometimes go to dead people for years. Federal farm subsidies, which were originally meant to help struggling farmers survive, are now little more than taxpayer robbery, taking taxpayer wealth from working Americans and sending it to the have-mores. According to 11 years’ worth of Environmental Working Group data that tracks $200 billion in subsidies, the wealthiest 10 percent of “farmers” have collected 75 percent of the money. That’s exactly the kind of socialism that Rep. Bachmann and her elite ilk like.

The lesson here isn’t that we should be doing more of this to help “the poor”, it is that no matter which of the two major parties, they are all in this for power and to get their hands on your stuff so they can give it to someone they decide is more deserving.  Because they can.  The only way to eliminate this behavior on both sides is to take the power of redistribution away from all of them; not as this article seems to suggest, give them even more power.

Yet voters keep thinking if only they could get the right guy in office, there will be Change ™.  Looks like folks are starting to figure out that’s not so.

Hat tip to Hit and Run