Has a Harvard Professor Mapped Out the Next Step for Occupy Wall Street?
But consider the case of food subsidies and tariffs. These manipulations began during the Great Depression, when the cost of actual staple foods — flower, rice, etc. — was high enough that starvation was not unheard of. The government introduced tariffs to protect domestic farmers, and subsidies to lower the costs of food. But the system has now been in place for close to a century and political money has twisted it into shapes that have no hope of being justified by any actual utility. We place tariffs on sugar, so that sugar in the U.S. is two to three times as expensive as in other countries. And we subsidize corn production: the US government spent $73.8 billion between 1995 and 2009 subsidizing corn, driving its price close to zero. One result of these policies is that High Fructose Corn Syrup was nonexistent in 1980, but accounted for 41 percent of all sugar consumed by Americans by 2006. Another result is that cattle raised in the U.S. are now fed almost entirely corn, which they don’t digest well, requiring antibiotics on a massive scale and producing poorer quality meat. And even though the subsidies account for huge outlays for the federal government and the tariffs make products more expensive for Americans (the sugar tariffs cost the overall economy an estimated $3 billion per year, while providing $1 billion of extra profits to domestic sugar producers), they’ve proved impossible to eliminate under the current system. Every time a politician floats the idea of reforming or eliminating the farm bill, they’re reminded that a small percentage of the money the beneficiary companies make is allocated to campaign contributions, and crucial for the reelection of a large number of senators and representatives.
(Source: azspot)
