Christopher Shays: “we have done a tremendous job fixing our system of social welfare, and the reforms have been a tremendous success in my…”

“we have done a tremendous job fixing our system of social welfare, and the reforms have been a tremendous success in my district and across the nation. We did the heavy lifting in 1996 and we will reauthorize those reforms later this year. I find it extremely troubling that our Nation's agricultural policies seem to follow a philosophy completely opposite that of our social policies: a hand out, not a hand up. At the same time we're preparing to strengthen our social welfare reforms, we're completely repealing any semblance of agricultural reform. This Farm Bill will bring our total agricultural spending to $208 billion over 10 years. It not only perpetuates crop subsidy programs, it virtually doubles them. It represents business-as-usual for our nation's heavily-subsidized agriculture community. Our Nation's agriculture policy is possibly the most disgraceful aspect of the entire federal government. If I had my way, I would scrap the wasteful, bureaucratic Department of Agriculture and all its programs, and start from scratch! The Department has an astonishing 99,000 full-time employees. By comparison, the Department of Education has just 5,000 employees. We need to come to grips with the fact that our farms are growing too many crops, which has led commodity prices to plummet. Yet, in the face of such convincing evidence, we refuse to take any market-oriented approach.”