Congress Tells Americans Concerned about Food Prices to Go to Hell

With food costs soaring in the United States and abroad and growing concerns regarding a global food crisis, a bipartisan majority in Congress again showed themselves unfit to govern by passing a $300 billion agriculture bill intended to pander to American farmers. The bill spends $40 billion dollars on subsidizing already high food prices, taxes the import of ethanol in order to drive up fuel prices, and even pays farmers $30 billion to keep farmland idle at a time of food shortages and price increases.

In addition to those policy decisions, the bill has also been porked up with items such as subsidies for race horse owners in Kentucky.

Democrats overwhelmingly passed the bill in hopes of buying off rural voters who traditionally lean Republican. A majority of GOP congressmen joined in out of fears that the Democratic strategy might work. The losers in all of this: the American people, who need a Congress that is serious at a time of economic fragility and spiking food costs.