Subsidies are an alternative to having massive granary stores to supply an entire nation. If you don't guarantee overproduction, you will soon find yourself having shortages as crop yields can vary up to 30% each year. Without subsidies farms will optimize towards producing only barely enough to satisfy demand so they don't waste money on crops they can't sell, profit margins are usually 1% or less so there is very little room for overproduction. Once everyone is trying to thread that thin line, a single bad month of weather or a large wind or hail storm would turn you from a food exporting nation to a food importing nation overnight, and crop prices will swing wildly in either direction from it.

Subsidies certainly are poorly applied and could use some serious work fixing them, but just getting rid of them outright is foolish.

Subsidies can be about ensuring crops are produced in-country instead of imported from cheaper countries. This is not the same as saying there is no market for the produce.

And as much as I'll criticize the way we run farm subsidy programs, I have to say I'm glad that my food isn't stuck on a ship off the coast of California right now.

Tariffs are an option

If the demand is unelastic, stopping subsidies or introducing tariffs will increase prices ending up with the consumer and most probably hitting the poorest people worse. From that perspective, billions shopped to mega corps could be an ironically capitalist way to socialist means. Better ways perhaps to achieve the same but don’t know if they would align with a capitalist worldview, e.g. socialise the production, or cap profitability etc.

We already provide food assistance to our poorest, we could always redirect those subsidies directly to poor families

You are right that we do provide food assistance but benefits are not always enough to last a month: ". . . most SNAP beneficiaries run out of food after the second or third week of the month; some of them cope by turning to local food pantries like the ones Community FoodBank of New Jersey runs." [1]

In addition, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has written, "many low-income households that receive benefits still have trouble affording an adequate diet. An Institute of Medicine report identified several shortcomings with the current SNAP benefit allotment and noted that most household benefit levels are based on unrealistic assumptions about the cost of food, preparation time, and access to grocery stores. Many families face stark choices between purchasing food and paying for rent and other necessities. If they manage this shortfall by buying lower-cost but less nutritious foods, it can adversely affect their health." [2]

Directing farm subsidies or any other money to current and future SNAP beneficiaries would benefit millions, including working Americans: "The number of SNAP households that have earnings while participating in SNAP has more than tripled — from about 2 million in 2000 to 6.5 million in 2017. The share of all SNAP households that have earnings while participating in SNAP has also increased — from about 27 percent in 2000 to about 31 percent in 2017." [3]

Regardless of dealing with the very problematic farm subsidies, the president and congress must do something about food insecurity.

[1] https://www.salon.com/2014/01/19/what_i_learned_from_a_week_...

[2] [3] https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/the-supplement...

Unless that also includes raising the maximum income threshold for SNAP recipients, that would just move the burden from the absolute poorest to the marginally poor.

Ok so raise the maximum income threshold significantly while we're at it?

It's not like both of those things are not equally likely to happen (which is to say not likely)

But two unlikely things both happening is less likely than either one alone.

Socializing or capping profit will guarantee shortages.

Who cares where it’s produced? If farmers in a developing country can get off aid and earn a living, good for them. I do care how it’s produced.

There are two main aspects.

One is long-term food security - even if global trade is mostly fine right now despite the current hiccups, there's no telling how it's going to be in a decade or two, and it's hard to ramp up production (due to lack of skillset, machinery and infrastructure) if you suddenly need it; so it makes all sense to pay some fraction of a percent of your GDP to ensure long-term strategic security of your food supply, especially if it looks like global tensions will eventually rise due to climate change.

The second aspect is that even in the current circumstances we're seeing rapid urbanization and depopulation of the countryside, which is generally seen as a problem for many areas. In a "natural" regime without rural subsidies this would happen even faster.

So many reasons why this is bad, but the most obvious reason right now is the supply chain crisis. It’s one thing if you can’t get a new car. It’s another if you can’t get new food.

Relying on imports for food makes your country a sitting duck in times of war. All the enemy needs to do is blockade you and then you can be starved into submission.

Given the global logistics mess at the moment, I would think it's pretty obvious why the location of food production matters.

States know very well that any given civilization is about nine meals away from anarchy.

The problem is that the whole farming industry is proped up on subsidies and if you ended it tomorrow almost every small to medium farm would fold and get bought by a large farm or sold to build a housing development.

That isn't consistent with 10% of the farms taking 90% of the subsidy.

The subsidy argument is a scam anyway. It's a commodity market. The margins will be razor thin, the end. If you subsidize production, prices go down. It will eat the whole subsidy and leave the margins razor thin.

The only way the subsidy helps you is if you get more of it than your competitors. Now who do you think that applies to, the family farm or the huge corporation with lots of lobbyists?

If 10% of them grow 90% of the food then it's completely consistent.

Your misunderstanding is that a subsidy is not aimed at one US farm versus another, it's US farms versus foreign farms.

The reason should be pretty obvious, without the subsidies they would be no US farms. And then in time of war there would be trouble.

There are a huge number of US industries that exist only to make sure that US capacity will remain even in time of war.

The same goal could be accomplished with tariffs, but then the price of food would be higher.

> If 10% of them grow 90% of the food then it's completely consistent.

The claim implied that the small farms get more of the subsidy, i.e. that they would be the ones wiped out without it.

> The reason should be pretty obvious, without the subsidies they would be no US farms.

Why would there be no US farms? Real estate in San Francisco is much more expensive than it is in Mexico City or the like, but farmland in Oklahoma is not uncompetitive with farmland outside of the US.

If this was the real reason then the subsidies wouldn't be suspiciously concentrated at the location of Iowa caucuses.

>If this was the real reason then the subsidies wouldn't be suspiciously concentrated at the location of Iowa caucuses.

Politicians are crafty buggers who will repurpose anything they can to provide themselves with an edge, so that doesn't necessarily say anything about the theory behind the subsidies.

Lower food prices are good for the consumer. Exclusively focusing on the supply side is a mistake.

The consumer is the one paying the taxes that fund the subsidies. That isn't helping them.

I get the general point you're making, but in a progressive tax regime like the US, the poor (who benefit most from lower food prices) are paying proportionately less of their income as tax than the rich, so this is helping them. Many US families paid no tax in 2020 due to tax credits, so they won't pay for the subsidies.

I would definitely argue that there are simpler ways of helping low-income families to afford food though, if that is your goal... just lower their taxes further, or give them negative tax / UBI if they are already paying no taxes, rather than adding lots of complex gears to distort the economy to try and affect the same outcome. Or more food stamps if you don't like the idea of poor people spending their tax rebate dollars on non-food items that they prefer.

Income tax may be progressive (before deductions, of course). But payroll taxes definitely are not, and if you earn under 50, 60k or so, your payroll tax burden is going to be higher than income tax. Sales tax and gasoline taxes aren't progressive either.

> I get the general point you're making, but in a progressive tax regime like the US, the poor (who benefit most from lower food prices) are paying proportionately less of their income as tax than the rich, so this is helping them.

That's assuming that you would lower taxes uniformly instead of e.g. lowering them for the lowest tax bracket, which is in no way required.

Start with removing corn subsidy. There is so much corn ovrrproduction that it gets processed into a bit of sweet and blended in to packaged foods like ketchup. And blended into gasoline. Corn subsidy is massive economic distortion which leads to monocrop farming and lack of diversity.

Given the choice between a free market plus bread riots every time there's a bad growing year, versus subsidies and no bread riots, I'm going to have to swing towards subsidies.

As I understand it, during a bread riot, free marketeers get eaten first.