date:May 11, 2012
by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, on that topic became public. The study was requested by Senator Tom Coburn, a fiscal conservative Republican from Oklahoma. (Coburn, you may recall, was part of the bipartisan Gang of Six senators who tried to find agreement on deficit cutting last summer.)
The GAO found that if the same limit of $40,000 on direct payments were applied to federal subsidies for farmers crop insurance premiums, it would have saved the fed