Date: 2002-05-01
Speaker: DAN MILLER (republican)
Chamber: H
State: Florida

Mr. Speaker. it is a pleasure to be here with my colleagues today. and -I commend the gentleman from Michigan. someone who is a real farmer here in Congress. and on the Committee on Agriculture. -to be able to stand up and say. this is a bad bill. Each of us come from different districts. whether it is from Wisconsin. where there is a lot of small family farmers. and in my area. we have a lot of tomato farms. and citrus is a big area. But even though we do not know too much about this bill because it is basically a secret bill that we will find out about tomorrow. basically it just helps a limited number of people in a limited number of States. The problem is that this bill is a total reversal of a philosophy that those of us that came together. the gentleman from Michigan . when we came together with a conservative philosophy to say. we need to reduce the size and scope and government. and actually in the 1996 Freedom to Farm bill. we started to do that. It was a glidepath to reduce the role of government and to open up the agriculture market. I voted for that bill. but this is a total reversal. Not a total reversal in the amounts of money and the programs. but the targeting of other specialized programs. We got rid of the wool. mohair and honey programs back in 1996. They are back. Why are we subsidizing wool. mohair and honey? The peanut program is going to cost us billions of dollars. Now. I like peanuts. but the problem is we do not need to spend billions of dollars on peanuts. I do not grow peanuts in my district and I do not think my colleagues here on the floor grow peanuts. But if you grow peanuts. you will support this bill. So there is bipartisan support. but there is also bipartisan opposition. We do not really know the full cost of it. I have been trying to find that out. and some are saying it is $171 billion. but we really do not know. When we passed Freedom to Farm in 1996. it was projected to cost $47 billion. It turns out to be costing $123 billion. Now. this bill is supposed to be $171 billion to start with. so it is a huge increase over what we passed in 1996. and what happened in 1996 is any indication. we are into a $350 billion bill and program. $350 billion. Here we are up here getting ready to go through the appropriation process figuring out how to get enough money for Pell grants. for prescription drugs. how to have enough money for homeland security and taking care of the war on terrorism. and here we are going to spend $350 billion on these farm programs over the next year. Now. the gentleman mentioned the sugar program. The gentleman is correct. This program is getting worse. It was a bad program to start with and they made it even worse. It is so. bad .that last year. the Federal Government had to buy $500 million worth of sugar and then had to store it. Now we are paying to store the sugar. and we are creating a program that is going to have an incentive to produce even more sugar and the Federal Government is going to buy more sugar. I do not know how we are going to store all of this sugar that is going to be bought by the Federal Government over the next years. Under trade regulations. Mexico is going to be allowed to sell more sugar than the United States. So we are going to be flooded with sugar. This bill encourages overproduction. and sugar is just one of the programs that they claim does not really cost very much money. T]iey claim it was not going to cost anything until last year when they had to buy the $500 million worth of sugar. Because what it does is it costs jobs. The sugar program. what it does is. it sets an artificially high price for sugar in the United States. and what it does is. it drives jobs out of this country. The gentleman from Michigan. for example. talked about the Lifesaver plant in. I think. Holland. Michigan.