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Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

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Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#421

Post by spacecadet »

spacecadet wrote: post #231
unglaublich wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People outside of the US look down on inferior products like HFCS, bleached chicken, hormones used in beef cattle, prevalence of GM crops, the preventive use of antibiotics in poultry, hen battery cages, and permissive-by-default use of additives. If at least all those bad farming practices would lead to very affordable food, then one could make an argument for it... but currently the US just does worst of two worlds…

you do know those are industrial food manufacturing outcomes not farming outcomes? Ain't no one bleaching my families chickens, or giving their cattle growth hormones. Americans have been tricked and mislead by marketing and conglomerate, some of which is European.

Down votes by brainwashed wooites.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#422

Post by Throaway1982 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #418
Throaway1982 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop demonizing rural people as flyover moo cows and start speaking to them along class lines.

Who are the dems who have done this?

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-rural-v...

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#423

Post by rincebrain »

UncleMeat wrote: post #250
jfengel wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does seem that they are often unaware of the the social spending on them. Some of it is surely economy of scale: it's diffuse so everything costs more. Delivery of social services is much more efficient in urban settings, and its failures make the news.

The huge bulk of social spending is in the form of direct payments or reimbursements. Medicaid, disability, snap. That stuff. I don't buy that this is much more efficient in urban settings.

Something that should also be factored in, IMO, is the gap between "on paper" and "reality", and how it varies by area.

That is, my friends in rural areas report a lot more cases of hostile workers in medicaid/etc processes actively doing their best to screw people over, to an extent that I, as someone who's always lived in the suburbs or cities, would have expected someone to get fired over. "Misplaced" paperwork, "oops, I told you to submit the wrong thing and now the deadline is passed, too bad so sad", "refer you to another doctor with no openings for 3 months...who then refuses to see you because the referral was malformed, and now you need to get in again at the first place because they refuse to do paperwork without an appointment..." ...the list of ways that you can be malicious in the gap is very large.

But in larger environments, my experience is those people get fired or transferred out of those positions once a stink is made, because regardless of the organization's feelings as a whole, they don't want the attention the stink caused. In smaller settings, that response is harder to trigger.

So that would be, I suspect, a major reason this can work better in urban settings - because the people who actively sabotage the use of these services are better filtered out.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#424

Post by elsjaako »

silisili wrote: post #358
elsjaako wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've repeated the part that the parent poster claimed to understand ("I've heard that it's because farming as a business is full of unpredictability"), but skipped over the part they didn't understand ("wouldn't there be a significant market for private insurance?") with the statement that insurance is a parasite. Can you explain more why insurance is a parasite? Maybe a state-run insurance would be better? Subsidi…

Fair! My comment was probably more dramatic than it needed to be, but I was trying to paint a picture as it kinda irks me when a lot people act like farmers are 'welfare queens' just taking money and living the good life. Not that OP did that, but it makes subsidies a 'dirty word.' Subsidies is a hugely loaded term that would take more than a few comments to even begin to cover, but yes, they do cover those things th…

I see your point a bit better. I definitely agree that insurance can be terrible. I will say that with US health insurance you've pretty much picked the worst possible insurance to compare it to.

Farmers typically have more knowledge and more budget for good advisors than consumer health insurance buyers. There are all kinds of business insurance, and I think these are not usually considered as horrible as health insurance. Also, with good insurance you've got a partner who is very invested in understanding the risks you're taking and letting you know (in the form of how much you have to pay).

Some subsidies are probably a good idea, especially where you want to encourage behaviors that would not naturally be encouraged by the market (e.g. getting farmers to not grow crops that you don't want them to grow, or do things that are good for the environment but not legally required).

Sometimes it's probably neutral, where the food is cheaper in the supermarket but taxes are higher and in the end it's just the consumer paying anyway. My guess is that this usually isn't the most efficient way to get money from consumers to farmers.

And sometimes subsidies are actively harmful, like when they encourage growing crops beyond what the market requires.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#425

Post by Throaway1982 »

jayd16 wrote: post #345
UncleMeat wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specific actions would you like elected dems to do that you aren't currently seeing?

They won't come out and say but they just want a "tough guy" to follow. Is anyone going to admit they voted for Trump because of his clear policies or clean execution, or sober leadership?

People voted for Trump because he was the only person who actually represented a change from the establishment. I wouldn't have voted for him (im Canadian), but I totally understand the frustration people feel with the political status quo.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#426

Post by [deleted] »

Throaway1982 wrote: post #425
jayd16 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't come out and say but they just want a "tough guy" to follow. Is anyone going to admit they voted for Trump because of his clear policies or clean execution, or sober leadership?

People voted for Trump because he was the only person who actually represented a change from the establishment. I wouldn't have voted for him (im Canadian), but I totally understand the frustration people feel with the political status quo.

[deleted]

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#427

Post by kiba »

triceratops wrote: post #336
FireBeyond wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily? Not that we've had one recently at the federal level, but there are multiple studies that show that state or city level minimum wage bumps tend to show an increase in average rental price, by the same percentage, within sometimes as few as four months.

You have to live in or near the city to collect the higher minimum wage. With UBI you could live anywhere. Even outside the country maybe. They aren't comparable.

UBI doesn't fix this because whereever someone live will start the process of someone absorbing income, regardless if it's income or not. You need to break the chain between income of people and land ownership by taxing land ownership.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#428

Post by kiba »

autoexec wrote: post #405
rangestransform wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orienting policy around individual home ownership just ends up eventually with more people’s voting interests aligned with landowners, and is part of the reason why increasing property values and NIMBYism is so entrenched in American government structures

We could definitely stand to orient some policy around making sure that first time homeowners aren't typically buying their starter homes at age 40. Having voting interests aligned with landowners wouldn't be a bad thing if most people were landowners.

Doesn't really fix the problem. All you done is distribute unearned income to a larger class of people.

People's labor and capital will get absorbed by land ownership.

You need to tax it.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#429

Post by Proziam »

reillyse wrote: post #416
Proziam wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lived in Sweden, Germany, and the United States. Just being honest about my experience here, but the cheap stuff (like potatoes) are cheaper in the EU but the expensive stuff (like beef[0]) are more expensive. [0] https://www.globalproductprices.com/rankings/beef_price/

When you take quality into account it’s no contest. You literally can’t buy American beef in the EU because it is so contaminated with hormones and antibiotics.

This is a pretty common claim, but in the US you can buy similarly 'pure' beef and it's still cheaper. I prefer the EU approach for general food production, requiring every stage of the process be clean enough that you don't need to chlorinate chicken, for example. But, Americans do have access to the same quality food at much lower prices (and they earn more besides).

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#430

Post by throwaway2037 »

seanhunter wrote: post #221
throwaway2037 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 40 billion sent to Argentina This is nonsense. The US has a 20B USD currency swap agreement with Argentina. Currency swaps aren't free money. It is basically a line of credit between central banks. When you use it, you pay interest on the borrowed money. You would be surprised how many of these exist with the Big Three (US/EU/JP) central banks with other, smaller central banks. Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs-…

A currency swap absolutely isn't "basically a line of credit". Any swap is a credit agreement insofar as each party is committing to future possible liabilities, but a currency swap is a very standard instrument which is part of central banks' monetary policy toolkit and helps them in their mandate to ensure currency stability. Swaps can be extremely flexible so the terms differ wildly, but they're not generally a li…

High level, yes, I agree that line of credits are different from currency swaps. However, in this case, when Argentina activates the currency swap, they are essentially sending toilet paper (nearly useless currency) to the US Federal Reserve and receiving something very valuable (US dollars). The Argentinan currency does not truly float (they have bizarre official exchange rules), so if the toilet flushes, the US Federal Reserve isn't left with anything useful. In the past (according to a brief Google search), the Central Bank of Korea had a currency swap agreement with the US Federal Reserve (or is it the US Treasury? I always forget those details). In this case, the Korean Won has real international value, so it is much less like a line of credit.
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