Some excerpts:
- The current standard for women and Hispanics is more rigorous than the one used during the rounds of settlements—the last one ended in 2010—to award billions of dollars to blacks who claimed to be victims of USDA discrimination between 1981 and 1996. In those cases, black claimants' simple assertion that they had attempted to farm or had applied unsuccessfully for a farm loan was sometimes sufficient to collect a large payout. In December, the Government Accountability Office noted that most of the black applicants' claims had been "evaluated based solely on the information submitted by the claimants and, as a result, the adjudicator of these claims has no way of independently verifying that information."
- The Government Accountability Office has estimated that a quarter of bankruptcies among USDA's farm borrowers in the 1980s occurred because farmers received too many subsidized loans. Almost half of such borrowers were delinquent in the mid-1990s, and the agency wrote off $15 billion in bad farm loans between 1989 and 1996. A 2006 USDA study found that half of the subsidized farm loans granted in 2000 had defaulted at least once by 2004, and that vast numbers of loan recipients simply gave up farming. It is hard to understand how government wronged anyone by not providing the financial steroids that would have led many to ruin.
- The real problem with federal farm loans is that they are prejudiced against common sense and sound business practices. There is no shortage of commercial loans nowadays for competent, credit-worthy farmers. USDA loan programs exist solely to let Congress steer capital to politically favored applicants. The fact that the loans often leave recipients worse off is irrelevant as long as congressmen reap campaign contributions and votes from many beneficiaries.
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