> According to the market people would generally rather spend that money elsewhere

Or some people don't have the money to spend on it at all. This is the fundamental issue with using "willingness to pay" as proxy for "utility consumer gains."

The appropriate way to fix that problem would be to directly give the money to the people who have trouble paying for food, instead of giving it to dairy farmers.

This (some kind of UBI) does seem like the best solution to give those that don't have money a say what we produce.

But this still doesn't address tail risk like war or disasters. Importing 100% of the nation's food might make sense from a market POV but is a significant risk from a strategic POV. Markets do not seem to handle low probability events very well.

Subsidizing the heck out of corn and soybean production while keeping average income low has resulted in an unbelievably unhealthy diet, and incredible external costs to the environment, while centralizing and corporatizing agriculture and making a small number of people extraordinarily wealthy.

There are many better ways of accomplishing the geopolitical goal of maintaining enough food supply and production capacity to keep people going in a crisis.

Who is importing 100% of their food?

US is a net exporter of food products.

Do you know who lacks food? China!

Just because SAD has had a lot of milk in it for the last 70 years, doesn't mean that we actually need it.

Milk consumption dropped and we need to drop financial incentives for it.

I had never heard of this abbreviation, so in case someone else is similarly curious, it appears "SAD" in this context stands for "standard American diet": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_pattern_diet

Excess milk production acts as a buffer, because shortages in food can be quite severe depending on what happens any given year and it takes a while to ramp up production in response.

The program was developed in response to shortages of milk during wartime.

Farm subsidies generally serve a few purposes in the US:

1. Maintaining the political support of farmers

2. Maintaining surplus food production capacity in case of some contingency (e.g. war).

The same is true for many developed countries. The US government actually produced “government cheese” with surplus milk to help support dairy farmers, providing the cheese to schools and welfare recipients. The EU has also experienced subsidy-related supply surpluses, including a “butter mountain” and a “wine lake”.

FoodStamps was literally created to give farmers money, indirectly.

There's one issue with supporting individual products - government cannot change these rules with the consumption patterns of individuals.

As such - it's not the subsidies that are the primary issue, it's the fact that the government decided that milk gets the subsidies... but almond milk gets the full market price.(As in - vegans are actually financing carnivorous american lifestyle more, than the other way around)

There have been counterexamples, such as federal dietary guidelines that promoted margarine as healthier than butter.

In any case, almond farming in particular is just awful.