Aid Is a Bumper Crop for Farmers

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The result is that farmers often get paid twice by the government for the same disaster, once in subsidized insurance and then again in disaster assistance, a legal but controversial form of double-dipping, a Washington Post investigation found. Together, the programs have cost taxpayers nearly $24 billion since 2000.

The government pays billions to help farmers buy cheap federal insurance, billions more to private insurance companies to help run the program and billions more to cover the riskiest claims. And on top of all that, it spends billions on disaster payments.
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A major share of the money goes to parched and flood-prone areas where farming is tenuous at best and "disasters" seem to happen every year, a review of thousands of records and interviews with dozens of farmers, economists, insurers and government regulators have found.

Farmers in Gaines County, a parched stretch of West Texas, collected nearly $66 million in the past five disaster bills. Cavalier County farmers in North Dakota, soaked by rain and floods, got $67 million. The money was in addition to $116 million that farmers in those two counties got in crop insurance payments.

Just four states forming a narrow swath in the middle of the country -- Texas, Kansas, South Dakota and North Dakota -- collected nearly four of every 10 dollars of the disaster aid handed out in the past decade, $3.8 billion in all, records show. Farmers in those states also collected $5.6 billion from crop insurance.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/14/AR2006101400807.html

"farming the mailbox"

and the people it should be helping rarely benefit.

maybe they need to go into the electricity biz instead? :shrug: