Government-Sanctioned Lying and Reparations Increase National Debt: The Pigford Class Action

There are only 36,697 black farmers in the entire country, but in a class-action lawsuit, more than 86,000 African-Americans claimed to have suffered from race discrimination by the Department of Agriculture during their time as farmers.   They are getting “‘virtually automatic’ $50,000 payouts” at taxpayer expense, thanks to the Obama administration.  It has repeatedly loosened the requirements for payouts in a class-action lawsuit against the government known as the Pigford case, in order to make such payouts possible.  Essentially, the Obama administration is using the case to award race-based reparations to people who never farmed or even intended to farm.  The government’s collusion with the plaintiffs’ lawyers in this case will ultimately cost taxpayers billions.

The next time you hear President Obama on TV challenging his critics to identify any unnecessary government spending that can be cut, and suggesting that there is no waste to be found in the federal budget, keep this case in mind.  In 2009, Obama made a big show of ordering his cabinet to come up with a measly $100 million in cuts even as he submitted a record budget request of $3.67 trillion (not counting hundreds of billions in “emergency” spending).  That $100 million was less than 0.003 percent of the budget, and is much smaller than the billions that the government will ultimately waste on the Pigford case.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that “President Obama’s policies would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.”  That’s despite the fact that there are $3 trillion in tax increases built into the president’s budget.

Obama recently signed a deficit-expanding $26 billion public-employee bailout.  The stimulus package is now expected to cost $75 billion more than predicted.  The stimulus package is using taxpayer subsidies to replace U.S. jobs with foreign green jobs. It also destroyed jobs in America’s export sector.

One issue in the Pigford case was the fact that people with bad credit ratings didn’t get loans from the Agriculture Department as often as people with good credit ratings.  That was deemed “discrimination” because African-Americans tended to have lower credit ratings on average than whites.