Attention Economy


Thursday, May 26, 2016

Unintended Consequences of Farm Subsidies

An excellent WSJ op-ed: A Subsidy as Shameful as They Come
“The real culprit here are federal peanut programs with an almost 80-year record as one of Washington’s most flagrant boondoggles. Subsidies have encouraged farmers to overproduce and then dump surplus peanuts on the USDA, which winds up stuck with hundreds of millions of pounds.
That food has to go somewhere, and the department sees Haiti as the ticket. Food-aid policies have long been driven not by altruism, but by bureaucratic desperation to dispose of the evidence of failed farm policies.”