Some 18 years after it was enacted, it looks as if Pat Roberts' "Freedom to Farm" will shortly be dead and buried.
Good riddance, IMHO. I think I've always been of the opinion that it (the idea of phasing out payments) wasn't going to work and particularly it wasn't going to work the way Roberts drafted the provisions. If you're going to phase out payments, your law needs to cover the whole process, taking the payments down to zero. (Somewhat like the tobacco termination payments did.) Instead they just had small reductions over a period of 5 years. It was like a 2-pack a day smoker saying that he'd quit smoking by reducing from 40 cigarettes a day down to 35, and then he'd quit.
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