Sugar farmers win budget tug of war

Sunday, December 25, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 AM

Sugar farmers win budget tug of war
By Joel Havemann

Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — The 770-plus-page budget-cutting bill that went to the Senate floor last week was considered a political must-pass by Republican leaders, who were loath to go home for the holidays without demonstrating at least some concern about the red ink that has swamped the federal government. Because every budget cut hurts some people while sparing others, lining up votes usually comes down to horse-trading.

But this year, the process turned into a window into how the game is played.

As they prepared to send the spending cuts to the floor, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and his Republican lieutenants realized they were headed for defeat unless they nailed down one more vote. And to get that, Frist had to meet the asking price of one of two Republican senators, Norm Coleman of Minnesota or Gordon Smith of Oregon.

Smith vowed not to support the bill unless it was changed so that proposed savings on Medicaid, the federal health-care program for the poor, were achieved at the expense of drug companies and other providers instead of coming in the form of lower benefits for Medicaid recipients.

Coleman's price for supporting the package was removing from the bill a provision that would have eliminated $30 million in subsidies for sugar-beet growers, many of them in his home state.
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http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002703315_sugar25.html

Business first, especially if it donates money like the drug companies.

Disgusting.

yet the dairy magnates around here live in palaces built with government welfare subsidies for a product
only NEEDED by calves.This policy is full of contradictions, competition vs subsidies, survival of the
economic fittest, image vs reality. The price support structure for milk is totally wierd here in California.

I say let the people who want to drink bovine chemically infested milk pay for its true cost.

Of course our local congress person is all in favor of these subsidies even tho his party is allegedly
for free markets.

Msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

instead. Also, the corn syrup producers spent ungodly amounts of money lobbying, much of it to keep the sugar subsidies and price supports in place.

If the price of sugar fell to world market price, the high fructose corn syrup producers would have no market in the U. S. Worldwide, sugar is much cheaper outside the U. S. than it is inside.