The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE SUGAR PROGRAM” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Agriculture was published in the Senate section on pages S17426-S17428 on Nov. 18, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE SUGAR PROGRAM
Mr. EXON. Mr. President, I was absolutely astonished at the remarks made by my colleague from New Hampshire a few moments ago, when, if I heard him correctly, he said that the sugar program of the United States was Marxist in nature. I will with some restraint tone down my rhetoric on that, except to say that the Senator from New Hampshire is wrong.
Coming on the floor of the U.S. Senate at a time when very delicate negotiations are going on and assailing one part of the agricultural bill--in this instance, the sugar program--I think is not helpful. It is not constructive. It is not good Government, especially in that it would further impair the delicate negotiations that are now ongoing.
Let me speak a little bit about the sugar program. If we would follow the recommendations, as I understand it, that were just made on the Senate floor by the Senator from New Hampshire, we would in effect be eliminating the production of sugar in the United States of America for all time to come. The sugar program does not cost the taxpayers anything. It is true that it does prop up prices to a very reasonable level so that we can continue to have such a fundamental ingredient as sugar as a part of the American production system.
If we would follow the recommendations, as I understand them, from the Senator from New Hampshire, we would, in effect, eliminate the sugar program in the United States of America. All of our industries that rely on sugar as a key ingredient of our diet would go down the tube, and the United States of America would be totally reliant on imported sugar for as far as we can see into the future.
I would simply say to my colleague from New Hampshire that maybe we should follow that same program with regard to milk production. I do not know how much sugar production there is in New Hampshire, but there is a great deal of milk production. There is both sugar and milk production in my State of Nebraska. I would simply say that, if we are going to destroy the sugar program, it would only follow that we would destroy the milk program. If we are to logically follow the recommendations by the Senator from New Hampshire, I do not know what the milk producers in New Hampshire would think of that, but I would suspect that they might not be very much impressed.
Mr. GREGG. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. EXON. I will yield at an appropriate time.
I simply say to the President, and to the Senate, that if we are going to try to work things out here, I think it is not proper, and it is not accurate, to come to the floor of the U.S. Senate and indicate that the sugar program is Marxist in its concept when it clearly is not.
I happen to feel that if we could tone down our rhetoric, if we could recognize and realize that there are differing points of view from people who are basically well-intentioned, then we can come together. I happen to feel that the Republican plan on the farm bill that was originated in the House of Representatives is a total disaster for America. Not only is it a disaster for America in our food production industry, but I think it turns the farm program--good, bad, or indifferent --into a welfare program. And few understand that if we accept the agricultural program announced and endorsed by the House of Representatives, we would be turning the farm program into welfare.
Why do I say that? Mr. President, a key ingredient of the so-called Roberts farm plan is to pay farmers even if they do not plant anything. Can you imagine anything that smacks of ill-advised welfare, if we would start paying farmers for not doing anything or producing anything?
That part of the Roberts farm bill that I refer to as farm welfare pure and simple is so revolting and so illogical that I think it should be rejected out of hand. Yet, that program is alive and well today and was given editorial support this morning in the Washington Post.
The Washington Post has been historically against farm programs. That is well known, and that is very right. They are an Eastern newspaper that does not understand at all the needs of rural America and have had no pretense whatsoever of understanding the problems of rural America. I think their editorial writers down there in the Washington Post think that food is something that you go down to the supermarket and buy off the shelf.
I simply say in returning that I understood the arguments of the Senator from New Hampshire would be that we should junk the sugar program because it is Marxist. That would be another step down that road that we have gone a long distance in traveling with regard to nearly 60 percent of the fuel that we use in the United States today, oil-based fuels, comes from overseas.
We have been down that path before when we recognized that a few foreign oil cartels can literally, if they want to, get together and set the prices for oil. That is bad enough, and we are not taking enough steps, in the view of this Senator, to correct that. But to follow the same road by eliminating sugar production in the United States of America, which would surely come if we would follow the recommendations of the Senator from New Hampshire, we would simply say, in addition to being solely dependent in the future for the major part, if not all, of oil production, we would be also following down the line which would be even worse with regard to a basic part of our food supply and distribution system.
Mr. President, I simply say that this is a time for all of us to maybe control, rein in our rhetoric at a time when the leadership of both the Democrat and Republican Parties is at this very moment trying to institute some kind of a compromise and agreement, if you will, that will eliminate the crisis that we have today and have some kind of a framework understanding of what we are going to do in the future, to come to some agreement with regard to the future budget of the United States and how we are reasonably going to balance it.
With that, I yield the floor, and I certainly yield to my colleague from New Hampshire for any questions he would like to ask the Senator. If I did misinterpret his remarks, I would appreciate his explanation.
Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for an additional 5 minutes so we might have a colloquy between myself and the Senator from Nebraska.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. GREGG. No, the Senator did not misinterpret my remarks. Karl Marx was an economist first. He became affiliated with communism, of course, but his basic theory of economics was that you should essentially, through controlling the marketplace from the top down, move dollars from one segment to another as the state determined appropriate. That was the basic theme of Marxism, that the state should use the power of the state to move dollars from one group to another and manage the marketplace both through transfer of wealth through income-related activities and also transfer wealth through pricing activities. That was the basic theme of Marxism.
If you look at the sugar program, the open market price for sugar today is 10 cents a pound. That is what it was quoted at on CNBC just yesterday. The price support is set at 18 cents a pound, but the target price that is used, which is outrageous to begin with, the target price which is used by the Agriculture Department is somewhere around 21, 22, 23 cents a pound. I am not sure. It is right in that range. The basic reason, of course, being under the structure they do not want anybody to end up having to pay back their loan. So they make it possible for the price to be so much higher than even the support price that no loans ever end up going into default.
Maybe there is some other term you use for this that is appropriate, but when there is no market force of any nature involved in pricing the product, that is certainly not capitalism. It is certainly not an Adam Smith approach to managing a commodity. It is a management by the state of the price of the commodity to benefit the producers of the commodity, and in this case it happens to be that 42 percent of the benefit runs to sugar growers who represent 1 percent of all the sugar farmers, happening to be the cane growers in this instance, not the sugar beet growers, who would happen to be from Nebraska.
I happen to think we could restructure this program where your sugar beet growers have a much better opportunity to get some of that 42 percent of the benefit and not have the consumers pick up the $1.4 billion subsidy which is incurred as a result of setting the price arbitrarily at the number which has no relationship and which is almost 100 percent higher than at what the free market sets the price.
So did I use the term Marxist economics to characterize it? Yes, because it is a state-run, state-dominated, state-controlled price-
setting mechanism, which is the classic definition of Marxist economics. If it were a free market or if it were a quasi-free market, you might use some other term. If it were a quasi-free market, I suppose you could characterize it as a farm subsidy program. But it is even beyond that. So that is why I used that term. I think it is an accurate characterization. I do not deem it pejorative in the sense it is inaccurate. It may be pejorative because that form of economics has been so rejected by the world now. But it is a fact that exists.
Now, as to the dairy program, I would be willing to make a deal right here with the Senator that we put all products on the basis of market economics, we have no subsidies underlying any commodities. I will vote for it. If you want to take the dairy program out of any subsidy program, I will vote for that, if it is part of a package to take everything out. In fact, I would probably vote for it if it were not a part of a package to take everything out. Dairy is an issue in which I am not a great defender of the price supports either.
I think the issue here that I raised with sugar is a legitimate issue and the characterization is accurate. So I yield to the Senator from Nebraska for his comment.
Mr. EXON. Mr. President, for clarification purposes, if I might ask my colleague from New Hampshire whether he would so characterize the dairy programs that we have in the United States as Marxist, as he has clearly indicated he feels the sugar programs also are?
Mr. GREGG. I do not think the dairy program is an egregious example of price controls, because the dairy prices are much closer to a market-driven event than the sugar prices. So I would say we are somewhere in between. It is clearly not a capitalist system. It is clearly not a market system that we have in dairy, which it should be, and I strongly support moving to a market system. But it is nowhere near the egregious price-support levels that we have in the sugar system.
So, no, I do not think I would say it is a purely state-dominated system, but it has clearly got too much state domination in it. I wish we would correct it.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Mr. COATS addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.
Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I appreciate the last discussion. Clearly the issue of sugar subsidy and maintaining the price that is substantially above the market price has been detrimental to consumers in this country. It is true it has no direct effect or impact on the Federal budget. That is simply because we have shifted the entire impact to the consumers of this country.
But that is not why I am here to speak. I think that subject has been adequately debated between the Senator from New Hampshire and the Senator from Nebraska.
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