Given the way the US government hands out money to anything even remotely related to agriculture, it’s amazing individual farmers aren’t hiring lobbyists to try and secure a bigger piece of the federal pie.
The Greenville News is reporting that SC textile companies are eligible to hit up the US Treasury to pay for upgrades to their plants and equipment, part of a program created under the 2008 Farm Bill.
Cotton mill owners can get up to 4 cents from the US Department of Agriculture for every pound of cotton they use under the program, the News says. That should total between $70 million and $80 million in just the first year of the five-year program, the News reported.
Like many corporate welfare programs, this effort does more harm than good and only postpones the inevitable.
Since 1997, more than 600 textile mills have been shuttered nationally, including 114 in South Carolina. That doesn’t exactly sound like an industry on the upswing, does it?
Textiles still have a role to play in the South’s economy, but spending tens of millions of dollars annually to shore up an industry that began shifting to foreign markets years ago doesn’t make much sense.
This isn’t just about throwing good money after bad, either. Every million dollars in tax money that goes into propping up retrograde industries is a million dollars that comes out of the pockets of entrepreneurs and consumers, money that could be better spent by the individuals and businesses that earned it in the first place.
The $70 million-$80 million that is expected to be doled out to cotton mill owners in the first year of this program will still have to be collected from real people, and the resulting higher prices for cotton goods will still hurt consumers.
The desire to help those impacted by economic evolution is understandable, but it doesn’t change reality. A century ago, Uncle Sam could have bailed out every single buggy whip manufacturer and it still, ultimately, wouldn’t have made a difference.
The Cotton Boll Conspiracy 