Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtsylve | Hacker News Reader

Does this also mean that they're the largest private recipients of farm subsidies?

Farm Subsidies are largely a myth and a misconstruction of "externalities" as subsidies. If you knew how to get the alleged subsidies the media likes to trot out to disparage farmers into the hands of actual farmers while charging a small % as a consulting fee you'd be unimaginably wealthy.

USDA estimated farmers received $46.5 billion in direct payments in 2020. Where did this money actually go?

https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=17833 The past decade it has been only about 10 billion a year with fixed direct payments largely eliminated in 2014. 2020 will obviously be an exception due to Covid-19. Most of the recent payments are Market Protection Programs to prevent exports from being wrecked by retaliatory tariffs under Trump. https://www.farmers.gov/manage/mfp

That's very much a means-tested program to prevent farmers from being driven into bankruptcy by tariffs on things they've already produced. It's not a magic money fountain.

I'm only upvoting b/c you clearly have navigated USDA ERS website before... (or google skills are lvl 100)

That type of info should be a whole lot easier to access and digest than it currently is.

This doesn't really answer my question. I knew the money was given for reasons. The question is who is really getting it.

Note that the same report says that excluding subsidies, farmer net income increased in 2020 over 2019, so I'm not convinced the Covid pandemic is a good reason.

Hard to say. Farm subsidies have limits to discourage this. There are a ton of loop holes, and not all crops qualify for subsidies. There is also debate about what even is a subsidy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com