Ag Retailers Association Part 3

Ag Retailers Association Part 3. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

The landscape on Capitol Hill has changed and 2011 should be an interesting year politically. Daren Coppock, President and CEO of the Agricultural Retailers Association said that in the last several Presidential elections it wasn’t so much that the American public was voting “for” a candidate as it was voting “against” one.

COPPOCK: And I’m hoping we can get back to the point where we’ve got two very qualified, very capable candidates on both sides and people can choose between them on the issues rather than “well I’m sick of what’s here so I’m going over there even though I don’t know what it is.” But I think there has been a little of an aspect to that in the last couple of elections.

Coppock takes a look some of the consequences of this political environment.

COPPOCK: I think we see a lot of people in the Congress rather than trying to solve problems, score political points and position themselves for the next election. And it you think about it there’s a strong incentive to do that. If you can delay action on something until the next election and blame the other party for the failure then you’ve got a better chance of becoming chairman the next time around.

He believes that it may take some action more like what happened in 1776 to fix this problem. Coppock also mentions the pendulum effect can have it’s own problems.

COPPOCK: We try to work with people on both sides of the aisle but if the centers of gravity shift further to the left for Democrats and further to right for Republicans, the people in the middle that can actually build the bridges - there aren’t very many of them left. And when the pendulum swings from one side to the other, those are the people that get booted out the door.

The moderate ground in the middle is becoming smaller and smaller which is creating its own problem. Another issue according to Coppock that really causes some hard feelings is the way things like the health care bill get passed through parliamentary jockeying in a way that requires less than the usual 60 majority votes and he says that this can cause Congress to “kick the can” down the road on major issues.

COPPOCK: And those can include simple ones like this crazy 1099 requirement that any business over $600 bucks; if you do more than $600 dollars of business with somebody you have to issue them a 1099, that was part of the healthcare bill. The tax extender bill. Everybody kind of agreed that it “sure” would be nice to have fewer taxes and keep those tax rates low and make sure the estate tax doesn’t go back up to 55% but the final bill that got passed includes things like a payroll tax holiday of like 2%. You’re social security withholding will be reduced by 2% which sounds good but social security spending is still made whole so guess where the money comes from? It’s borrowed. It’s added to the national debt.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.