Pulling the Wool Over Taxpayers’ Eyes

Let us celebrate a small victory for taxpayers, and for common sense.

After nearly 40 years, the federal subsidy for wool and mohair producers is nearing the end of its days. A Congress that historically is loath to make any cutbacks in pork-barrel spending has surprised everyone by voting to phase out the wholly unnecessary subsidies by 1996. The savings over the next five years could total $500 million. That’s of course minuscule viewed as part of the overall budget. But to paraphrase the late Sen. Everett M. Dirksen, half a billion here and half a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

The subsidies got started just after the Korean War, when Congress began to fret about not having enough domestically produced wool to meet the military’s need for uniforms. Besides, the American sheep industry wasn’t doing all that well in the face of imports. Neither, come to think of it, was the goat industry. So a subsidy for mohair, which comes from Angora goats, was thrown in as well.

The national security rationale for the subsidies evaporated in 1960, when the Pentagon stopped classifying wool as a strategic material. But still the subsidies rolled on and on, even as U.S. wool production fell steadily. Only this year did Congress, prodded by the Clinton Administration, finally rouse itself to deal seriously with one of the more scandalous agricultural subsidies. A lot of sheep have been sheared over the program’s four-decade life. But it’s the nation’s taxpayers who really have been clipped.