This Piece of Orange Shit Belongs In Jail

[The Grand Nudger]

Both major parties advocate subsidizing big business, and big agriculture, in the form of subsidies and tax breaks. Cutting off that fundng, is it really that bad?

Assuming you're not up for re-election, of course.

Yes, it;s that bad.  We've got ourselves by the balls on subsidies, that;s why both sides are onboard. Setting yourself against them is political suicide. That's the -reason- that some people want to get welfare out of the farm bill, so they can more easily gut it, welfare..mind you, not the farm bill, lol.

@Tazzy. Not, entirely, accurate. The price at the produce aisle is already hiked. We pay the max of what we -will- pay whether they get the subsidies or not. The market wont pay more for a banana, it;s already being leveraged for as much as it will bare. Subsidies drying up wont compel people to pay more, for a banana. That's not to say that producers and retailers wouldn't -try-, but they're always trying to get us to pay more for whatever it is they're peddling, once they know we will pay some x...no amount of cut costs or subsidies from the gov will ever be transferred to the consumer, they know we'll pay x..they pocket -whatever- the difference between cost and x is. Business as usual.

Ag subsidies aren't meant (and don;t) drive down prices. They're meant to ensure continuity and predictability of production, that's in the best of cases, obvs. Many of them have their origins in the great depression, when there was food rotting -everywhere- because people didn't have the money to buy it...simultaneously impoverishing the farmer and starving the consumer. The gov said to itself. Well, how about we buy some of this unused, perishable productivity, and feed it to the teeming masses of the penniless? Fast forward nearly a century, some of those programs are ag subsidies (read: corporate welfare), some are welfare (as in the kind that benefits living breathing human beings), and all are contained within the same bill.

None of the above is to say that -some- things wouldn't go up necessarrily, for example..corn. The price of corn is so artificially low through subsidies that it would -have- to increase. Thing is, corn costs so little that a percentage increase in the thousands amounts to a negligible sum in dollars and cents to end consumer. That's why it's in everything, and everything is made out of it.. It's the agricultural floor, rock bottom, the place and product where the only mitigating factor of profitability is how much of the shit you can peddle.