The administration proposes to limit payments to $250,000 per person. What is a "person"?
I well remember in the late 1980's a farmer writing in to complain (probably to his Congressman) about a letter he received from his local ASCS* office saying that he had been determined to be a person! He thought he'd been one all along.
Payment limitations have been a feature of farm programs for over 30 years. Congress, in its wisdom, began writing the limitation as "xxxxx dollars per person". It seemed clear enough to them: a person is a person is a person.
But not so fast. Nothing is simple to bureaucrats, because they have to try to match simple-minded laws to complex reality (in my objective view. In your view, they may just be fulfilling their anal-obsessive compulsions and/or creating work for themselves. )
If you're a bureaucrat, you ask questions like:
Should husband and wife who operate a farm (think Grant Woods' American Gothic) count as two people?
What happens if two brothers have a partnership--are they two people?
How about a parent/son corporation, with husband, wife, and son equal shareholders?
How about the Methodist church, when a parishioner with no children wills his farm to the church?
* ASCS= Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service--the name of the agency that administered most farm programs between 1961 and 1994.
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