Homestead mailing list

["clanSkeen" <sgian AT planetc.com>]

Tvo continues to forward without comment:

> and includes a controversial $10 billion buyout of the
>nation's tobacco farmers.

>....Opponents could filibuster in the Senate over the
>tobacco farmer buyout,

Living in the middle of tobacco country, I can tell you that the tobacco
buyouts is one of the biggest handouts based on fakery that the 'buy-a-vote"
crowd ever came up with.   A great lot the money goes to people who have
bought up chunks of old dairy and cattle farms which had a tobacco
allotment - who have never grown tobacco in their lives and never intend to.
A typical pattern is to buy up some rural land, collect the tobacco
settlement, then subdivide it and build McMansions on it, which they would
have done with or without a settlement.

Why in the name of all things reasonable and unreasonable should we (through
taxes) be paying tobacco growers because their market has disappeared any
more than we'd pay tomato growers or asparagus growers??   By the bye, many
of those growers around here who no longer wanted to play the tobacco game
began to grow tomatoes and asparagus (and peppers and cabbage) and while
they don't make as much money doing so as they did with artificially priced
tobacco, they often make more profit.

James