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Plant Milk Is Better For Us and the Climate. So Why Do We Subsidize Dairy?
(www.motherjones.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Need to keep the ag subsidies flowing so that rural areas keep voting conservative
The industry got too big and too reliant on subsidies. A reckoning will occur at some point, it's just a matter of whether it's announced ahead of time or surprises everyone.
Every day the reckoning will be worse than it would have been the day before. That's why it should be planned and not A) ripped off like a bandaid or B) have it fail on its own.
Right now the government is doing practically the opposite and reassuring and strengthening the bandaid despite the inevitable need for it to come off.
I get it. I'm also on board with UBI. Hell, I'm even a vegan that isn't calling for an immediate end to all subsidies for the ag industry even though a vast majority of it is in support of a practice that I believe to be highly unethical and horrendous. But I get that it can't change overnight, but that doesn't mean to keep kicking the can down the road either.
The human cost then will be more than the human cost now. It just will be "future" humans instead of the current ones so they so keep supporting it and making it someone else's problem.
Ok, leave a note behind to explain to your children's family why they're in extreme poverty because some folks didn't want to gradually remove a subsidy in a controlled fashion. Again. You're just punishing more future people. But I guess since you don't have to meet them, you're ok with sacrificing their livelihood.
You will never get a UBI while large amounts are subsidizing specific industries. Wanna know where you can get that money though?
The thing is, I don't even think we disagree that much. You just are taking the one approach I advocated against (but still argued would be better than doing nothing; ie keeping the subsidies) and pretending that's my whole argument. I argued for gradual removal of subsidies to correct the market over time. You are advocating for a scenario that likely will never occur without some other large scale disaster or giant swing in public consciousness (UBI will never occur prior to ag having a market bubble pop.... one will never happen during our life, one has a chance to).
"It's not a good time right now" - the party in power at the time
Too big and too reliant on subsidies is a feature, not a bug. You want your farmers producing a fairly large surplus most of the time, because the harm resulting from a major food shortage is catastrophic. A widespread drought, disease, natural disaster, crop failure, or other shortage needs to be made up with other foodstuffs.
Subsidization incentivizes production even when market rates fall below profitability, which is what happens when production is significantly greater than actual demand.
Sorry, but that's horseshit.
Taking away dairy subsidies would drive up milk and milk product prices, pushing more people to buy alternatives instead. Any loss of employment in the dairy industry is balanced by new jobs in manufacturing plant milks and dairy alternatives. This isn't people being replaced by robots, it's cows being replaced by plants. You still need pretty much the same workforce to package and distribute it regardless.
New Zealand and Australia virtually eliminated agricultural subsidies and their industries are doing just fine.
Only 1% of americans work in the primary sector and that is not only comprised of farmers. Furthermore, there are more farming products than dairy, oats for oat milk have to be farmed somewhere as well.
It's not as if Democrats don't also throw plenty of bones to farmers.
Even if the farmers themselves are likely to be relatively conservative, they're such a politically sympathetic group that no one wants to be seen as "going after hard-working real American farmers!". Things like the Iowa caucuses playing a huge role in national politics don't help either (although the Dems have thankfully killed that).
It's more of a matter of if food gets more expensive you're more likely to be voted out of office