THE 2018 FARM BILL
Anyway, as I was saying... writing is a business just like farming. Writing something takes the same kind of patience and care that growing something does. And, like farming, writing is dependent on the weather. If the weather is too good, I can’t get any writing done because I’m outdoors playing golf. Specifically, I am a humor writer. I often get the “seed” of a hilarious idea and, frankly, it just refuses to grow into a healthy stalk of humor. It isn’t funny at all. It just sort of droops over and dies. I wind up with jokes that are a load of crop . Why isn’t my crop insurance subsidized? Writing is also a commodity, the way agricultural products are. And the dollar value of my commodity has been falling drastically. Print magazines are dead, newspapers are dying, and the book-publishing business is in dire straits. Plus, at my age, I’m not the young, hip, edgy writer who connects with the Millennial sense of humor, assuming there is one. I could use some price support here! And then there’s conservation. Preserving the environment happens by paying farmers to take good care of their property. My property is me. And humorists are part of the environment – at least we will be until political progressives require all humor to be recycled so that it’s bias-free and gender-neutral. Plus, I’m 70 – I need some preservation. Impartial Reader: Oh yeah? What about Social Security and Medicare? Well, um, yes, there is that...
Social Security costs about $1 trillion a year, and Medicare costs another $672 billion or so. If we use the CDC traditional 10-year time frame for government mandates to project Social Security and Medicare costs over the next decade... and if we assume that nobody gets older and sicker making those costs rise... we’re talking about $15.67 trillion . Impartial Reader: Which sort of dwarfs the farm bill’s $867 billion. My bad. What’s a mere $867 billion in government handouts to other people compared to a $15.67 trillion handout to me? I apologize. I’ve written a bitter and spiteful piece charging Congress with robbery, calling Republicans clodhoppers and Democrats slobs, accusing farmers of being economically negligible and poor people of being fat (I’m no sylph myself ), telling Lena Dunham to put her clothes on, claiming the president of the United States is illiterate, and insulting po-faced Millennials for having no sense of humor. Impartial Reader: You should take it all back . I take it all back. U.S. federal government mandatory spending is more than $2.7 trillion a year – we’re all on the government gravy train. Impartial Reader: And why shouldn’t farmers be on the gravy train, too? After all, they made the gravy.
62 June 2018
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