Political Quotes

“I see also that this is a problem of the survival of the future of farm programs. With all of this publicity that is going out, and it does not matter what paper we pick up, they now realize that there is a loophole; and the Environmental Working Group has passed out the information that a lot of these big corporate-type farms are getting a lot of the money. I think that is going to come back to hurt the average family farm in terms of the kind of programs that we can offer here in Washington, D.C., because it is bad publicity, so a lot of people start thinking, well, farmers are already rich. They are getting these million-dollar payments. The fact is exactly as the gentleman suggests, that in our efforts to appease these large, influential farms, these large landowners, the large grain and cotton dealers, we have come up with a program that allows those big farmers the incentive to have unlimited production, overproduction, really, if you will. That means that the prices are going to go down for everybody else, with more pressure on those farmers. When push comes to shove in the next 10 or 15 years, when we are looking at the survival of Social Security and the survival of Medicare, and we say, well, are we going to have to cut off some of the farm programs because a lot of people in America say we are giving too much money to these rich farmers anyway, what do Members think is going to happen?”