02/02/07 FB Reaction & Spending

Farm Bill Reaction & Spending not Saving. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report. Reaction has been mixed to Wednesday's announcement of the 2007 Farm Bill. Senate Ag Committee Chairman Tom Harkin. HARKIN: I'm especially concerned about putting more money in the old freedom to farm type of direct payments. We need to change course in this country. Now this proposal tends to start moving us in a new direction and I'm happy about that but I think it needs a little bit of fine tuning and that's what we intend to do here in the Congress. National Farmers Union President Tom Buis says his organization agrees with a number of the aspects outlined in USDA's proposal. But at the same time - he says NFU fundamentally disagrees with some basic concepts of the proposal. BIUS: The thing I would say about the payment limit issue is that it tends to be very divisive. It also tends to be very controversial and often times gets in the way of policy makers looking at the cause instead of just this symptom and payment limits are symptomatic to low prices farmers receive. According to a U.S. Commerce Department report, Americans are spending most of what they make and not building their savings accounts. Personal savings rates are at the lowest level since the Great Depression more than 70 years ago. The report says the actual number is a negative 1 percent which means that not only are we not saving, we are either dipping into any existing savings or increasing borrowing. Now here's today's Washington Grange Report. (GRANGE) That's today's Northwest Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.