There's a phrase you don't hear around here very often: a good New York Times editorial. But it applies to today's blowing the whistle on a White House effort to shovel some big farm subsidies to Arkansas to help Blanche Lincoln's Senate re-election campaign:
in many cases the payments would overcompensate farmers.
Relief payments would be based not on a farm's actual loss but on the amount it received under the government's direct payments program, a generous annual subsidy based on a farm's size regardless of market conditions. Anyone with a loss of more than 5 percent would get a check amounting to 90 percent of the subsidy. This would be a big, unjustified windfall, especially for big farmers.... this looks to us like a save-Blanche-Lincoln program rather than a save-the-farmer program....the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, promised to find the money.
