Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's important to understanding how just wrong the thinking behind this comment is. "Everyone needs X" does NOT mean that it's impossible for X to be subsidized, or for "the place that produces X" to be subsidized. > Flip this on it's head and we see that rural communities are providing a huge subsidy to urban communities in the form of labor and commodities. That's not how economics works. That's not how any of this…
Cities literally can’t sustain themselves without outside inputs - food, building materials, energy, etc. Subsidizing agriculture isn’t a “rural” subsidy, it’s a “population” subsidy.
It's both, actually. Just like if the government started paying for free, say, cloud storage, regardless of where anyone lives, that'd be a population subsidy on the consumer side, and an area/industry-specific subsidy on the producer side.
> Cities literally can’t sustain themselves without outside inputs - food, building materials, energy, etc.
Irrelevant. People need transportation, too, but if the government starts buying people bikes and cars, that's a subsidy.
Note that nobody's calling for the federal government to spend zero money in rural areas, when they talk about subsidies, they usually mean spending a disproportionate amount of money there. What "disproportionate" means is itself a question -- I think the most logical definition is "gets more federal $ in spending than they send to DC in tax revenue" but you could argue otherwise.