Agriculture

The first 100 days of our new administration will end April 30th. It's been relatively easy to keep up with what the President is doing, not so easy to keep up with his cabinet. Researching the Department of Agriculture gave me a headache.

In the first place, the Department of Agriculture has a $95 billion dollar budget for the 2009 fiscal year. $23 billion of which is discretionary funds. The biggest chunk of their budget, according to the pie charts on their website, 63%, goes to nutrition assistance. ($59.85 billion and please feel free to check my math because according to my calculations, their budget doesn't add up.)

Of the $59.85 billion dollars, $6.3 billion goes to WIC, (Good program I wholeheartedly support), $40.2 billion goes to food stamps, (Good program that completely needs overhauled.), and 15.3 billion to child nutrition, which to the best of my research goes to the school lunch programs across the country. The only problem with that is that those three figures total $61.8 billion, which is 65% of the budget.

Okay, I can't exactly blame a new administration for mathematical errors made by the previous administration. If I'm not mistaken, the 2009 fiscal year started in September of 2008, two months before the election.

Now I am all in favor of the WIC program and the school lunch program and I understand why these programs fall under the Department of Agriculture. I even understand why the food stamp program is listed here, although, in my opinion, it shouldn't be.

The food stamp program needs to be overhauled, and turned into the necessities stamp program. Currently, people on food stamps can buy, candy, and soda pop, but they can't buy toilet paper or toothpaste. Congress wants to put a "health" tax on soda pop in an effort to help our country's obesity problem and raise money to help cover the cost of the recent bailouts, which is all well and good, except people on food stamps don't pay tax on what they buy with food stamps. Think about it, food stamps are tax dollars. You can't pay taxes with taxes. That means there will still be a percentage of the population who will be allowed to get fat while spending taxpayers dollars, simply because the system is screwy. It's not their fault. Ask any mother on food stamps which she would rather have the ability to buy, soda pop or diapers, laundry soap or candy, potato chips or cleaning supplies.


I had hoped President Obama would appoint Mitt Romney to overhaul the food stamp program. He is the obvious choice. Mitt Romney knows about "The Bishops Storehouse." Our government might want to check out "The Bishops Storehouse." It's much more in line with what we're trying to do through the food stamp program than what we are actually accomplishing.

Copyright © 2009 Annette Fortunato

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