On Sep 19, 2008, at 10:39 AM, Julia Thompson wrote: > On Fri, 19 Sep 2008, Kevin B. O'Brien wrote: > >> John Garcia wrote: >>> >>> >>> there could be zero (0) fraud cases and Republicans would still be >>> against >>> any form of personal welfare (they are divided on corporate >>> welfare) because >>> personal welfare is against their political philosophy. >>> >> Unless, of course, you are talking about farmers, who as a class >> are the >> largest personal welfare recipients in the entire world. > > Which could arguably be cast as a special case of corporate > welfare.... > > Julia
A very special case indeed, given the rather unique economic environment in which farmers operate. (I was thinking about this a lot over the past couple of weeks, having had to commute daily past some fields of dead corn killed by our latest drought down here.) Farming involves a very large front-end investment in land, equipment, and infrastructure that typically only pays off a few times a year at most, and then only if the weather cooperates. If every crop planted yields an optimal harvest, in the best case, the farm has a large sunk cost literally sitting in the ground until the harvest provides some income, and even then the farm is somewhat at the mercy of the market in which the harvested crop is sold. There's very little safety margin in those numbers even without a crop failure, which takes that meager payoff out of the equation and leaves only the sunk costs, which is a fairly large loss. (That's not counting the factory-farm neighbors who plant GMO crops and hose them down with Roundup and insecticides all season, killing half your crop with the overspray, dwindling availability of pollinators due to honeybee CCD, and a whole host of other threats to small family farms. FDA "organic" certification does provide a small measure of relief in terms of being able to be paid more for the crop you *can* produce, but there's a fairly large additional investment involved in that and it can be a gamble in terms of going for it, because it takes several years to meet the certification criteria before you can see those returns on it.) Farm subsidies are there basically to prevent the collapse of the farm industry and keep farmers in business, because the farming business is so economically anomalous the normal economic rules don't apply to it very well at all. And we are talking about our *food supply* here .. we made that bed a few thousand years ago, and with our current population/resource balance, we've pretty much got to lie in it .. it's either subsidies or we give up applying industrial economics to farming and create a special economic class just for it. And that latter is anathema to most American politicians. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
