On Friday Vanessa Carmichael posted on the Huffington Post a piece entitled The Payoff Patriots.

The CBO estimates the House's health care bill, H.R. 3200, would cost approximately $239 Billion over 10 years, so it seems remarkable that our country's rural constituency and their government representatives are raising so much hullabaloo over the cost of public option health care when they accepted $177 billion in farm subsidies in ten years. Again more than half of that money went to the benefit of just eight states. Meanwhile national health care is an expenditure that would benefit all states. The central issue of the conflict over health care becomes a matter of priorities when one considers the difference between the farm subsidies budget and the estimated national health care budget is $70 billion over ten years -- that's $7 billion a year, substantially less than what California spends annually on its prisons.

Local growers, small and medium-sized farms that produce fresh produce and meat don't make the cut for big money subsidies. American taxpayers subsidize commodity crops not so we can eat healthier but so that traders on Wall Street have something to play with and corporate farmers can keep prices so low on these crops that they underbid farmers in developing countries. It appears this is one aspect of socialism that heartland America can agree with Europe on.

Read it all here.