Hacker News Reader

>Without all the government subsidies, a pound of ground beef would be closer to $30-$40 today instead of the $8-$10/lb it is now

Source? That seems implausibly high.

Using your $38B/year subsidy figure gets us $112/year in subsidies per American. There's no way you can get $30 unsubsidized price from that unless you think the average American only eats beef once a week.

View on HN

… do they eat more?

I would have thought once a week is high.

Though median could differ from average. 12% of Americans eat half the beef

https://sph.tulane.edu/how-mere-12-americans-eat-half-nation...

Average American eat around 60 pounds a year, typically you eat less than a full pound when you eat so yeah they probably eat more than once per week.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-usa

Given the $112 subsidies per year above, that would add $2 per pound of beef, that would slightly raise the price not balloon it to 30-40 as poster claimed. So he was bullshitting.

Average includes vegans, and I'm pretty sure they eat it less than once per week. It’s just how much meat divided by population. The previous comment shows that the consumption is not anywhere close to equally distributed.

The subsidies are also paid by vegans. Both the average meat consumption and average subsidy can be multiplied by the total population to get the total.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com