Follow the Money 
By Martin Harris

Just when you’ve become convinced that the MSM are hopelessly and predictably biased in a leftist, pro-government direction, along comes a Main Stream Media member, the Washington Post in this case, to prove your sweeping generalization wrong. About a month ago, the Post reported in both specific detail and general background, that a lot of the US Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development Program money has been going to areas which non-USDA folks might deem pretty much non-rural. USDA has spent more than $70 billion on "rural development" since 2001, the Post reports, and a lot of it has gone for what you and I might call "non-rural development." Does it matter? After all, each billion spent on suburban golf courses and casinos (yes, I know the rules prohibit such construction with taxpayer money, but apparently they get built anyway) works out to only about $10 taken from each of some 100,000,000 taxpaying households and businesses, but, conversely, as the late Senator Everett Dirksen was supposed to have said, "a billion here, a billion there, and before you know it you’re into some real money." 

The Post’s poster-child (excuse the homonym) for questionable USDA/RDP decision-making is Provincetown, Massachusetts, Cape Cod Puritan fishing village turned high-end resort turned middle-income resort (that’s when my parents dragged me there) turned shabby low-end resort, turned artists’ colony turned, most recently, homosexual haven and enclave, a fairly similar sequence of real-estate transitions to what happened at the other end of the East Coast,, Key West, Florida. How did it qualify for multiple Rural Development grants and loans? Town Manager Keith Bergmann doesn’t know or care. The Post quotes him thus: Provincetown is many things to many people, and to USDA we’re rural. We’ll take it." I don’t have room in this column to theorize about the prospects for a nation whose governing class subscribes to this level of situational ethics, but I will note that it’s not confined to the likes of Provincetown or Key West. Here’s the Post’s paragraph on the subject:

"Although Cape Cod is only a short trip from Boston and Providence, and is home to some of the wealthiest beach towns in the US, to the Agriculture Department it meets the definition of rural America. That means it qualifies for aid originally intended for farmland and backwoods areas that were isolated and poor…" The Post continues: "More than half of [the $70 billion] has gone to metropolitan regions or communities within easy commuting distance of a midsize city, including beach resorts and suburban development…more than three times as much money went to metropolitan areas with populations of 50,000 or more ($30.3 billion) as to poor or shrinking rural counties ($8.6 billion). Recreational or retirement communities alone got $8.8 billion" 

In and around Provincetown, the Post says, "In a few weeks, artists, lawyers, and bankers will begin arriving here for the busy summer season on high-speed ferries that take 90 minutes to make the trip from Boston. They will land at a recently refurbished municipal dock that was built with the help of a $1.95 million low-interest loan from USDA." Other "rural" recipients were the Provincetown Art Association, an actors’ theater, a garden center, and a local tavern which has a clothing-store sideline. Such beneficiaries aren’t limited to salt-water-front "creative economy" enclaves.

More locally, in Vermont’s Rutland County, little Brandon now has a simply darling little French restaurant partially subsidized by taxpayers. Why? Because bureaucrats thought it would be a nice gesture to make, with OPM (other peoples’ money), exactly the same motivation that lies behind USDA’s decision to interpret their own rules to subsidize a not-exactly-farm-country urban area on the point of Cape Cod: "it would be a nice gesture to make, and we have the OPM to make it." 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights