“So you don’t take the mortgage interest deduction or the standardized deduction when you file your taxes?”
This is going to be my new response when people talk at me about being against “farm subsidies” – a blanket term people are using for the system of grants, loans, and financial programs the government has to keep both the farms and the food chain alive.
Here’s the quick version: If you don’t subsidize the costs of running a farm– leveling out the farms wins and losses– people won’t be able to afford food and farms will go out of business.
Period. End of story.
It’s happening at a faster and faster rate right now.
The train left the station on this under FDR with the New Deal. Unless you want to bring back the Great Depression, which you don’t, there’s no turning back.
Adam McLane
It costs more to produce food than people are able to pay. Without the governments help people will starve– which was common in the United States prior to the creation of our social safety net.
I know history is hard. And I know economics is harder.
But tax incentives are a thing that you benefit from in so many ways whether you agree with it or not. Without this system there is no middle class.
If you’re a W-2 employee your employer is covering half of your social security tax. Why? Because without it you wouldn’t be able to save for retirement on your own.
If you have a mortgage you already know the value of the mortgage interest tax deduction. Without it you likely couldn’t have afforded to buy your home. That’s why that mortgage is 4% instead of 15%.
If you’ve got health insurance through an employer you’re likely paying a fraction of the true cost of your insurance through a payroll deduction, they are covering the rest, and they get a tax incentive to do it so that you don’t end up without insurance.
When you buy a t-shirt at Walmart that’s only $12.99 because of a free trade agreement with Guatemala, which keeps the price artificially low by moving operations to a place where the companies can pay 1/10th what they’d pay a U.S. worker. You might not like that but you benefit from it nonetheless.
You complain about paying gas taxes at the pump but you also complain when there are potholes or insufficient road signage, largely paid for, in part, by vehicle license and gas taxes.
Most of what you buy is subsidized in ways you may or may not see or agree with. But together they’ve created the middle class.
Farms are no different.
If it costs me $7 per pound to grow tomatoes that you’ll only pay $4 for who is covering the other $3?
The government or the farmer or no one because the farmer quit.
The government typically does that to artificially keep the prices of food down. And they give that $3 to me through a series of programs, preferential loan terms, and business tax write offs– letting me write off my mileage for deliveries, grants to build infrastructure, or 0% interest loan on my tractor.
So it’s weird for me to hear people whining about farm subsidies because those same people BENEFIT from them and also an entire network of subsidies seen and unseen.
Without these farm programs you’d pay the true cost for food, which quite frankly, you can’t afford to do, don’t know how to do yourself, etc.
Let’s make this relevant to today. The current administration is dramatically shifting those dollars away from small farms to large corporations… which is why you’re seeing a DRAMATIC shift in the market as small farms like ours have to deal with these economic forces.
In the past, government programs and tax incentives covered those losses. But now we are? Hell no. I can’t afford to subsidize the food you eat at the cost of not feeding my own family.
Hence, more and more small farms and ranches are doing exactly what we are doing because we cannot bear the burden of lifting up your personal finances.
Want smal farms? Want a local food supply? You want more “farm subsidies.” (Programs and incentives to make it financially viable to keep going.)
Want more corporate farms? Want a food supply that “self-regulates” and lets a little poop get into the water to clean veggies or a little chicken-fat-born salmonella to get on jalapeños somehow? Then you want less “farm subsidies” but accept the fact that people will die of preventable food borne illnesses and people will die of malnutrition in the richest country on the planet
