Gertrude Stein said “A rose is a rose is a rose,” … and in Washington, a $286 billion farm bill is a $6 billion farm bill . They’re all the same thing, just like Stein’s roses. It’s a matter of bookkeeping and some pique.

Until this decade, farm bills were described by the amount of new spending they authorized, the yardstick used on most bills in Congress. The 2002 U.S. farm law was the first where the underlying spending — programs that are continued as part of the legislation — was lumped into the estimate.  It made the farm bill sound a lot bigger, somewhere around $200 billion instead of $51.7 billion in new spending.

With that precedent, the farm bills pending in Congress are described as $286 billion bills, a very large amount of money. Some congressional staff workers grumble at the tag “$286 billion farm bill,” because it sounds as if the money will be paid in a lump sum and it goes in total to farm subsidies.

Neither of those things will happen. It’s a five-year bill and public nutrition programs such as food stamps and school lunch get nearly two-thirds of the money. The Congressional Research Service has a chart that illustrates the breakdown. The chart also helps explain how $286 billion is the same as $6 billion.

When only new spending is counted, the new farm bills are $6 billion bills. When all of the continuing programs are counted, the farm bills would cost $286 billion over five years. The figures are estimates, of course.

Early on, lawmakers faced the challenge of writing a farm bill that spent no more than the $280 billion available in the “budget baseline,” the amount that existing programs would cost if extended into the future. With the offsets, the farm bill equals the baseline, too.

Picture: File photo of man at Republican Party congressional election rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, November 5, 2006.

– Chuck Abbott, Washington