Bubba breaks it down

Requests have trickled in for a visit with Bubba McCoy. Readers wanted me to gather the paunchy rascal's thoughts on the recent legislative session.

"I don't have any thoughts," he told me when I called the car lot east of here the other day.

None at all?

"We put in Republicans and they did Republican stuff. They cut some taxes and stood up for Baptists against homosexuals. Does a bear go in the woods?"


So what actually might be on Bubba's mind?

"I'll tell you exactly what's on my mind: Selling late-model pickups to farmers and late-model cars to farmers' high school kids. It ain't happenin' this year. I've had three farmers tell me in the last two weeks they can't afford it--that prices on everything but sorghum are so low they have a negative cash flow just by planting, and that they don't have any way out this year because Obama did away with direct payments."

Alas, with patient resignation, I explained: It was the Congress that went into a lengthy conference session and came out with a negotiated farm bill in 2014--signed by President Barack Obama, yes.

It did away with direct payments--subsidies long enjoyed by Arkansas farmers of rice, soybeans and cotton. It replaced those direct payments with new insurance programs either against falling prices or against low crop yields caused by actual natural losses.

Arkansas farmers irrigate so thoroughly and have enough flood-control structures in place that they long ago learned how to protect to a high degree against their likeliest natural losses. So they don't rely on insurance so much. And they could have chosen an insurance plan that kicked in below a certain price, but some weren't sure how that worked and were more comfortable with crop insurance.

So Bubba said: "I guess you blame the Republicans, like always."

No, I replied. I blame the Arkansas voters.

Bubba asked: "Is this more of your spiel about how we're too stupid down here for our own good?"

It is best, I said, simply to describe what happened in this particular case and leave broader conclusions to personal assessments.

And here was what happened in this particular case: In 2009, U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas and farmer's daughter from Phillips County, rose to the chairmanship of the Senate Agriculture Committee. It was the first such ascendance for our farming state so hostage to federal agriculture policy.

In 2010, the voters of Arkansas routed her in her re-election bid. It was over her support for Obamacare. The voters cut off their noses to spite farmers' faces.

So in 2014, when the farm bill switched aid from the direct payments our farmers like to the insurance Midwesterner farmers like, Lincoln was not around. She had been replaced by a Republican eye doctor from Rogers, John Boozman, who was a member, not the chairman, of that committee. Lincoln would have still been chairman, presumably, because the Democrats hadn't yet lost their majority.

I acknowledged to Bubba that there is no way to prove that Lincoln would have saved the direct payments. But I would have liked her chances. She likely would have held out for that above all else. And chairmen usually don't get rebuffed on their central points.

Bubba said: "But I thought you liked the farm bill. At least I gathered that from how you carried on about Tom Cotton voting against it."

I liked a new and practical and imperfect farm bill when it became the only option other than reverting to an old and impractical farm bill.

I am, above all else, a pragmatist, or so I endeavored to explain to Bubba, who said he had no earthly idea what I was saying.

So I tried to break it down: "My real point is that we can rail against government spending all we want, but government spending is so interwoven into our day-to-day economy that, when you cut it, it can hurt even the anti-government good ol' boy who thinks he just wants to be left alone to the free market so he can sell some dadgummed late-model used cars and pickups."

"So," said Bubba, "you're saying I'm the stupid one."

No. I'm saying that changing federal government spending for farmers can hurt the lovable sonofagun who tries to sell used cars and pickups in East Arkansas.

Bubba said: "So just tell me, Mr. Know-It-All: Which is better for selling used cars and pickups in East Arkansas--Hillary or Huckabee?"

I told him he ought to hope Hillary was better because she has an actual chance to be president.

I said Tom Cotton would be president before Huckabee would, in which case farmers and used-car dealers wouldn't be the only ones with something to worry about.

Bubba said I needed to get over Tom Cotton.

Maybe he finally was right about something.

------------v------------

John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 04/26/2015

Upcoming Events