Collin Peterson: “I have a copy of the House- passed bill, and in our bill we had a countercyclical revenue assurance program that was a…”

“I have a copy of the House- passed bill, and in our bill we had a countercyclical revenue assurance program that was a national trigger, as I said earlier. This is an idea that came about from the White House, and it is not something that is going to be given to people just automatically. This is reviewed as a reform and it was sold as a reform by the White House, and I was skeptical of it. But you have to give up 20 percent of your direct payments in order to get into this program. You have to lower your loan rate 30 percent. And this works not only going up, it works going down. So people are taking a risk by getting involved in this program as well as opportunity on the other side. So you can have your arguments about it, but this is something that we are trying out as an option. It is something we are going to see how it works between now and 2012. There are a lot of people, including the administration, that think that this is a better way to go than the current target priced countercyclical marketing loan situation that we have. We will see. I have been skeptical of it. But there are people in the Senate and other places that were thinking that this is a good reform. Now this idea that was just put forward by the minority leader that somehow or another this $287 billion goes to farmers, we have editorial writers saying the same thing around this country.…”