Gunpowder Chronicle posted on May 11, 2008 10:29 AM | Rating:
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There Heritage Foundation has a new chart up on the ridiculous stupidity that surrounds farm politics in America today. It's stupid, because our nation's farm politics have nothing to do with saving family farms, but with providing corporate rent-seekers (like, ahem, David Letterman) with gobs of taxpayer money to subsidize incredibly profitable operations.
If you think "Big Oil" is bad, you ain't seen nothing yet. "Big Ag" is worse.
Did you know that there are more employees in the US Department of Agriculture than there are farms in the United States of America? How can that possibly make sense?
And the Heritage Foundation chart doesn't even take into count massive tarriffs on items like imported sugar, which act as entirely other subsidy on an incredibly non-competitive industry. The tarriff on imported sugar is made even worse when you consider that, because of that tarriff, food companies switched to High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) over two decades ago to cut costs. Yet another distortion on the demand curve for corn that increases the price of food worldwide.