The Environmental Working Group continues to monitor and study farm subsidies. A recent story points out that farm income has shown its five best years since 2003 and also notes that farm income is about $10,000 higher than the typical rural neighbor. The distribution of farm subsidies (socialism, some would call it) is skewed, says the report:
The skewed distribution of subsidy payments is even more striking when you compare the amount of subsidies received to the household income of the farming operations receiving them. The average household income of farms that received $30,000 or more in government payments was above $210,000 in 2008, more than three times the average U.S. household income that year. Farming operations that received between $10,000 and $29,999 in subsidies earned $110,368 in total household income, 61 percent more than the U.S. mean household income. And the household income of farms that got between $1,000 and $9,999 in subsidies was $70,117, still above U.S. average.
I’d like to see them do away with ag subsidies. The market would adjust and I doubt it would raise the price of food in the long run. Who is keeping it going? The corporate farm lobby or the poor people lobby?
Thanks Contrarian- I’m mopping up the beer I just shot out my nose.
“the poor people lobby”- that was a good one.
Are you trying to be provocative, Contrarian, or do you really think there’s such a thing as a poor people lobby interested in maintaining government handouts to farmers?
I thought that was the major arguement for maintaing ag subsidies. It keeps the price of food down for poor people who have to pay a higher percent of their income eat. “Poor people lobby” was provocative but the premise was not. Do you really think there is not a group that lobbies on behalf of poor people?
Well googling “political lobby for poor US citizens” I didn’t see any websites that were overtly created for that cause. I did run across this article with that theme. It’s rather long but I couldn’t stop reading- Trouble in the Poor People’s Campaign
Google community organizer or social justice.
The libertarian Cato Institute is joining in with the Environmental Working Group to look into farm payments. Might seem like an odd partnership, but Cato says it’s just another effort to limit big government.
I hate the whole subsidy system. Paying people to not farm is a stroke of genious. Before you get off on telling me about other forms of corporate welfare, I say get rid of them all. I could go for a flat tax without any deductions or a national sales tax in place of an income tax.
Don’t farm subsidies go far beyond paying people not to grow?
Absolutely. I was just pointing to the blatently ridiculous.