this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
423 points (98.6% liked)
Not The Onion
11625 readers
817 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But I do (sort of) blame farmers (agribusiness really) for a lot of obesity. Maybe everything doesn’t need corn syrup in it?
Fossil fuels are useful as hell for chemical feedstocks and we mostly just burn them. Stop trying to prevent solutions by spuriously individualizing the causes.
Part of the background is that the government wants to keep farmers "on hand" even when demand isn't there, for national security reasons.
Essentially they want to be able to get more crops out of all farmers in a bad year, rather than rely on only a fewer number of farmers in a good year.
There are many greed/corruption/waste issues with this system, but all nations have a strong interest in keeping their breadbasket staffed up for hypothetical bad times
I've heard the fuel and plastic thing is again a subsidized endpoint for corn to keep the conveyor belt flowing.
There's more than just corn like that
I grew up on a tobacco farm, when it's sells it sells like an auction. If no one buys your crop, the government bought it for a set price and threw it in a warehouse in case we "ran out" of tobacco between harvests and companies wanted to buy more or some shit
But that's not even really a subsidy, so I'm not sure why you're talking about it.
I would say that a government guaranteed price floor would count as a subsidy, especially on a luxury/vice product like tobacco.
Not sure what the mixup is but it's a subsidy.