Today on C- SPAN the Agriculture Dept. Budget it is not entertaining but should be watched by all Americans.
The USDA is taking your and giving free food to to countries that hate us and likes I am all for charity but would take your credit card and buy food for everyone in the next town over. Charity begins at home. We are borrowing money and paying interest on that money to give food to other countries that have the to feed themselves and the politicians keep saying we have starving people here does that make sense???
Department of Agriculture Wasting Your Money
By: Mark Joppa (Mark is a tea party activist in the Hudson Valley, New York)
The United States Department of Agriculture (“USDA”) in fiscal year 2010 had a combined budget of 134 billion dollars, I’m sorry that is just insane. In fiscal year 2007 the USDA had a poultry budget of 88 billion dollars. What the hell could the Department of Agriculture spend 88 billion dollars on in 2007? Never mind 2007, let’s move more into the present and discuss the 2011 budget.
President Obama has proposed a budget for the USDA of another poultry sum of 145 billion dollars. In these tough times with high unemployment and the historically high national debt, how in the world can President Obama propose a budget of 145 billion dollars for the USDA? The man has lost it. Does he think this is the way to get the country going again?
Why the agency is named the USDA or “The United States Department of Agriculture” in the first place and what does it mean? The legal definition of “United States” is, includes the several States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth an of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Wake Island, the Midway Islands, Kingman Reef, and Johnston Island.
The next word up is “Department”, one of the principal divisions of the U.S. federal government, headed by a Secretary who is a member of the President's cabinet Not many of us can say we had the first one right, but I’m pretty sure pretty sure everyone has “Department” correct.
Onto the final word “Agriculture”, 1) farming: the practice of cultivating the land or raising stock, 2) Agriculture is the production of food and goods through farming, 3) The art or science of cultivating the ground, including the harvesting of crops, and the rearing and management of livestock; tillage; husbandry; farming. I think we all have that one correct.
I listed three definitions for “Agriculture” for a reason; it doesn’t come close to what I thought it meant. When you add the word agriculture to the words “The United States Department of . . .” it seems to have magically changed the definition to something that is almost indefinable.
“The Secretary of Agriculture, assisted by the Deputy Secretary, the Under Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries and members of their immediate staffs, directs and coordinates the work of the Department. Provide policy direction for all of the Departments responsibilities including research, educational and regulatory activities, nutrition, conservation and farm programs, forestry and International Farming.”
Wow, the office of the Secretary of Agriculture sure has a lot of responsibility and power! Identifying the lengthy list of Departments, Agencies and Companies that fall directly or indirectly under the auspices of the USDA and in turn those agencies have multiple agencies under them and so on and so on, alone, will have your head spinning (listed below). (I would have to write a series of twenty or more articles to truly explain the enormous duplicating nature, fraud and abuse that occurs with so many sub companies and agencies).
USDA has to be investigated and closed down
The 2011 budget for the agency called the Department of Agriculture is $149,000,000,000. It is nothing but a dumping ground for the socialist left wing of the Democrat Party, who have filled the thousands of numerous government positions with high paying salaries and cushy jobs, and in turn have lined the pockets of the Democrat Party.
If we break things down, I bet less than 5% of the revenue reaches agriculture. Most of the funds are spent enforcing existing rules on private business. In three years this agency has had an increase of $46,000,000,000 under the Democrats. Open your eyes America – the taxpayer is getting screwed.
With so much to choose from the orderly way to write about all the agencies and programs of the USDA is start at the top of the index and try not to get sidetracked by the insanity of the complexity of the USDA. I my humble opinion there is only one reason to structure something like the USDA is structured and that’s to make the average American’s head explode before they made it through the first set of agencies (Raquel you can take that line out if you like) or make the average American give up and do what most people do and say “That’s the U.S. Government for you.”
So let’s begin at the top of the 2012 Budget Proposal with the “Preface” that explains the terminology at a glance along with the hope and dreams of the agency which start off with the “Overview”. This goes onto say the following “Overview - Provide an overview of the 2012 budget by strategic goal and budget authority and outlays and identifies key budget proposals” The ‘Overview lays out a basic form as to what types of programs that the money will be spent on and shows a comparison of FY 2011 Budget and the FY 2012 Budget. This is also where I had to double and triple check to make sure I was still looking at the FY 2012 Budget for the USDA. Page one was OK showing a chart comparing the budgets over the last 4 years the same goes for the top of page2, but on the bottom of page 2 there is a pie chart showing a slice of just 13% of the $145,000,000,000 budget going to what they term “Farm and Commodity Programs”. If I combine my Math and English skills together I come up with just a total of 18.2 billion dollars being spent on agriculture out of the 145 billion dollar Agriculture Department’s budget. I may not be the brightest person in the room and considering I think of myself as an average American I’m beginning to feel like the Robot in “Lost in Space” having a meltdown as the preceding sentence does not compute. As I scanned the pages of the Proposed Budget I was holding there was barely a mention of the words Farm or Agriculture for the next 12 pages until I finally reached ‘Mission Area/Agency Details”.
The first section up in this area of the Budget is called “Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services” page 15 sounds good so far. Finally I have an agency home page that I can go to and find out what they spend the money on in the Agriculture portion of the Budget “The Farm Service Agency or FSA” http://www.fsa.usda.gov/FSA/hrdapp?area=hrdhome&subject=landing&topic=landing I click on the address look under search I click on all FSA and find 15 more departments under the FSA.
The reason I started looking into the USDA was because I was looking into waste and fraud in Hati and almost every agency I looked at in Hati led to the USDA so I started to look at the USDA instead and I have come to this conclusion one man can audit the USDA but he would have to give up his job, his social life, his wife and kids and have to move to Washington. I’ve been sitting here for 2 hours looking at the mass of data that I have collected so far on the first of 10 major agencies under the USDA and have to admit defeat. Have I proved anything not legally, but like some of the founding Fathers that warned about not using plain language, John Adams criticized English legal language and the "useless words" in the colonial charters. Jefferson lambasted the traditional style of statutes,
which from their verbosity, their endless tautologies, their involutions of case within case, and parenthesis within parenthesis, and their multiplied efforts at certainty by saids and aforesaid, by ors and by ands, to make them more plain, do really render them more perplexed and incomprehensible, not only to common readers, but to lawyers themselves
what do they have to hide. In the budget they don’t talk about salaries as in weekly or yearly they use the term feral staff years or non- federal staff years, in some places they add administrative cost and salaries together and some places not, in some part they give the exact cost plus increase in others just the increase. Why is the USDA paying for reconstruction projects in Afghanistan? Why is the USDA spending 200.5 million to feed pre schoolers in other countries and another 156 million for food for progress whatever that is. FAS is paying the State Department n additional 7.4 million for overseas administration how much are the paying them already why are the paying another branch of government and on and on it makes me sick to see where and how our money is spent. That the reason they bury it in the USDA budget no one will look there.
I suggest that everyone down load a copy of the USDA budget and bring your favorite parts to the attention of your Senator and Representative, I’m sure they will be happy to hear from you not….MJ
http://www.usda.gov/
So how do we get rid of it?
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