This is my crank policy that I advocate to anyone who will listen. We currently subsidize the agricultural industry on the supply side, which creates a lot of perverse incentives, destruction of food, ridiculous waste etc - what if we instead subsidized it on the demand side? Give everyone an EBT card and Americans will buy more food, and the money they don’t spend on food will go on to stimulate the rest of the economy. It’s really a no-brainer policy unless you hate poor people.
That would allow people to buy food from where ever, instead of using agricultural subsidies to allow American agriculture to have unearned advantages in the global food market and suppress the development of food independence worldwide.
honestly, that used to be the deal pre-nixon i want to say. to placate two constiuencies (farmers and low income families) the government purchased “commodities” (as defined by USDA title… raw/minimally processed agricultural goods flourmeal, cornmeal, milk, butter, eggs, probably some vegetables even) to institute a “price floor” and guarantee a certain income to the farming households even if markets/futures were volatile. those commodities were available through literal food stamps, similar to the ration cards found in other countries like cuba today. no cash. just stamps for commodities and stamps were made available depending on the size of the family.
it was one of those no-brainer elegant public policies that was dismantled to become a massive giveaway to food processors, who get to purchase the raw commodities at below market prices (because now the big agricultural subsidy program is for direct payments based on acres planted), which they add some salt + sugar to and turn into a shelf-stable quickly prepared vehicle for diabetes and heart disease.
Unfortunately they’ll never realize the actual solution to this alleged abuse is to just give everyone like $300/month in food stamps.
If everyone is food secure, selling the food at a discount for cash becomes very difficult.
I mean people would still do it but like yeah 1) everybody should have food money and 2) let people do whatever they fucking want with it, libs
I’ll buy everyone else out of the hummus they don’t want.
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Omg we have a chickpea emoji? I stg this place is a legume fan site that dabbles in socialism occasionally.
New tagline material
This is my crank policy that I advocate to anyone who will listen. We currently subsidize the agricultural industry on the supply side, which creates a lot of perverse incentives, destruction of food, ridiculous waste etc - what if we instead subsidized it on the demand side? Give everyone an EBT card and Americans will buy more food, and the money they don’t spend on food will go on to stimulate the rest of the economy. It’s really a no-brainer policy unless you hate poor people.
That would allow people to buy food from where ever, instead of using agricultural subsidies to allow American agriculture to have unearned advantages in the global food market and suppress the development of food independence worldwide.
And of course, we can’t have that. It’s bad enough that it would help the poor in the US, but helping the poor globally?!
Sounds an awful lot like Communism.
honestly, that used to be the deal pre-nixon i want to say. to placate two constiuencies (farmers and low income families) the government purchased “commodities” (as defined by USDA title… raw/minimally processed agricultural goods flourmeal, cornmeal, milk, butter, eggs, probably some vegetables even) to institute a “price floor” and guarantee a certain income to the farming households even if markets/futures were volatile. those commodities were available through literal food stamps, similar to the ration cards found in other countries like cuba today. no cash. just stamps for commodities and stamps were made available depending on the size of the family.
it was one of those no-brainer elegant public policies that was dismantled to become a massive giveaway to food processors, who get to purchase the raw commodities at below market prices (because now the big agricultural subsidy program is for direct payments based on acres planted), which they add some salt + sugar to and turn into a shelf-stable quickly prepared vehicle for diabetes and heart disease.