Preserving jobs by subsidizing farms is just about the most inefficient
way to do so. And we are talking a lot more money than "a couple of
billions". The bottom line is that we (both the US and Europe) have a
system where the ordinary worker's taxes are used to subsidize mostly big
farms, and to add spite to injury, the food prices are higher than they
need to be as a result.
Like I said, pigs feeding at the trough.
Cheers,
Nathan
Op Wo, 6 november, 2013 16:55, schreef Ken Norton:
>> Yeah, lots of families here:
>> http://farm.ewg.org/top_recips.php?fips=00000&progcode=total
>
> Rice and cotton are another story. But you look at those subsidities
> and they were price support for when the commodity cost dropped far
> below cost of production. Granted, in the south, there are some
> massive corporate farms, but I scanned the list down into the 300s and
> still didn't find anything in Iowa.
>
> The reality is that for rice/cotton production, I doubt that there are
> many family farms just because of the volotility of those markets as
> well as cost of production. In the deep south, farming has pretty much
> always been big business.
>
> Where I do have a problem with the above situation, though, is that
> there should be a little more free and open market. If the commodity
> price of cotton and rice is too low to sustain itself, then convert
> over to something else for a while until the prices come back.
> Unfortunately, in the real world, this usually means loss of
> capability and allowing other producers to dominate in a way that
> there will never be any recovery. Once we lose cotton and rice
> production, it will forever be gone.
>
> And then it begs the question of what happens to the people who worked
> that industry? A couple billion dollars to a handful of producers to
> sustain production provides employment to a whole lot of people. If we
> didn't prop up the crop price, we would have spent just as much, if
> not a whole lot more on other programs to help the unemployed.
>
>
> --
> Ken Norton
> ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.zone-10.com
> --
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Nathan Wajsman
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