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Osborne: No promises
TRENTON -- Rep. Tom Osborne made no guarantees, no promises of drought payments -- or rain -- when he met constituents in Trenton Monday afternoon.
Osborne said the odds are only 30 to 40 percent that Midwest farmers and ranchers will get some sort of federal disaster relief, but added, "I think something will happen. The disaster is wide spread enough."
Osborne said he and several other congressmen, whose states are being devastated by a drought now in its third year, are proposing disaster payments for 2001 and 2002. "We'll see what we can do," Osborne said.
Osborne said the real problem is with perception. The perception is, he said, is that the new federal farm bill "is full of money and farmers are overpaid," and that the federal farm bill is "terribly expensive," although, he said, agriculture accounts for less than 1 percent of federal spending.
"The assumption is that payments to farmers are all net profit," Osborne said. "They put it in their pockets and take it to the bank."
"The disaster is really a tough sell," he said. "We're in a quandary. There's no money we can get at." The last thing agriculture wants to do, he said, is to take disaster payment money out of rural economic development or environmental programs such as EQIP.
"We're asking for payments for 2001 and 2002," he said. "We're asking for a lot."
Osborne said the best bet is to channel funds within the farm bill to disaster payments. Although it is projected, he said, that the farm bill will cost $19 billion, it could actually cost $6 billion less. "There's a significant difference there," Osborne said. "We can take that money and provide relief to livestock producers and help crop growers."
"This might sell politically," he mused, "because it's not new spending."
Osborne said it is his guess the figure would be closer to $3-4 billion, and even that will be an uphill pedal. "It'll be September before we can get any traction at all," he said.
Although the farm bill does not include disaster relief payments, it does, however, include increases in funding for environmental programs and money for rural economic development and value-added agriculture. "There is lots of money for ethanol," Osborne said.
Everett Huddleson, chairman of Trenton's economic development committee, told Osborne, "We're an inch-and-a-half away from an ethanol plant here," and said Osborne's book on project organization and grant-writing techniques has been very helpful with Trenton's ethanol project.
Although Osborne has some doubts about federal disaster relief for agriculture, he feels "reasonably good" about prescription drug legislation passed recently by Congress, although it's stalled in the Senate.
The legislation will help rural "critical access" hospitals, improve doctors' Medicare reimbursement and restore cuts in home health. "There's lots of things good for rural Americans if we can get this passed," Osborne said.
Osborne said he is supporting legislation that would require that students in third through eighth grade be tested every year, rather than on an alternating schedule. "It's not a bad idea," he said. "We need some method of testing kids rather than just passing them on."
Osborne said a component of the education bill can provide between $20,000 to $60,000 in federal aid to qualifying schools with 600 or fewer students. "It's not a life-saver," he said, "but it will help."
Another issue important to Osborne is mentoring, which, he said, can reduce drug abuse, absenteeism, teenage pregnancy and criminal and violent behavior.
Osborne said society's prevailing belief that "character doesn't count," is very disturbing to him. "Changes in our value system bothers me," he said. The beliefs that 'If you don't get caught, if you get away with it, it's not a problem, are wrong, he said.
"This needs to be changed to make a health society," Osborne said, adding that some decisions being made by Supreme Court justices are only contributing to the problem.
Osborne said he, and Congress, disagree with a Supreme Court ruling that computer-generated virtual pedophilia -- which does not use real people -- is not illegal. "Congress reacted quickly," he said, to make computer-generated pedophilia illegal.
Osborne said appointments to the Supreme Court over the next two to three years will determine greatly how society defines its social values.