When you add everything up, total government subsidies for growing grain are in the neighborhood of ten billion dollars or so. Just for fun, let's calculate how that works out for the two million or so families participating.
On the front side, it looks pretty nice; about $5000 per family in subsidies. Let's look deeper, though.
Given that the average farmer is over 50 years old, we ought to guess that the 2% of adults working on farms account for 4-5% of the total medical bill, or about $80-100 billion. In the same way, an estimated 50% of medical expenses are due to poor diet and lack of exercise.
So if we can assume that sitting on a tractor or combine while eating corn chips and drinking something made with corn syrup might contribute to this, the overall bill to the grain farmer of grain subsidies would be approximately $40-50 billion dollars annually.
Granted, part of this is taken care of via Medicare and Medicaid, and most likely not all of the doubling of medical care costs for farmers is due to eating a little bit more grain products than one would recommend. However, it yet seems likely that--even before accounting for increased land costs due to subsidies--grain farmers in fact pay a very heavy price for grain subsidies through medical care costs.
The Problem with Modern Economics Education
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I’ve been recently doing a deep dive into the Austrian School with one of
my classes. We’ve talked in-depth about one of the central problems of
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6 comments:
my cousin is married to a farmer in IL.
he's a pretty healthy looking guy of 45, if you ask me.
dont know about their daily diet, but i can tell you they grow their own food. all of it.
even their meat.
they buy stuff that wont grow in pike, county IL, like fresh fruit.
the rest is grown and canned at home. they set aside a few acres for this.
he makes no money in farming. its a way of life, not a livliehood.
he works in construction, mostly, in between tractor rides.
he says his life is typical of a farmer's life.
Whence the assumption that farmers are generally poorer in diet and exercise than other folks? Sure, sitting on a tractor isn't aerobic, but some other parts of the job are physical and most modern farmers have as much opportunity for other forms of exercise as other folks. And they don't have any easier access to processed grain and corn syrup than other folks -- they send their stuff away to the processors in bulk, and if they want corn chips and coke, they have to go buy it at the store like everyone else, so there's no reason to assume they eat more of that stuff than someone who works in a cubicle in the middle of NYC. I don't get it.
Pentamom; they've got higher medical costs on average simply because they're older on average. I can't remember exactly how old, but I believe the average farmer is in his fifties, while the average non-farmer is in his thirties.
There are a number of other factors that could be involved--activity level, unknown effects of farm chemicals, and such--but overall, my argument is simply predicated on the fact that farmers are older than average.
Well, yes, I got that -- so I didn't understand why the remark about corn chips and tractors was there in the first place, unless it was meant to imply that farmers are worse in that respect than average, which there doesn't seem to be any reason to conclude.
Comment was there because...well...that's a pretty big part of growing grain. If you stop subsidizing grain, the marginal land goes back to pasture and the tractor gets sold or stays in the shed a lot more.
Well, of course, they sit on tractors a lot. But why the assumption that they sit on tractors, eat junk food, and not exercise the rest of the time? I just don't get where anything OTHER than age can be established as a contributory factor to their presumed health costs. In fact, my guess would be that farmers, regardless of what they grow, would probably be a bit low on the health cost side relative to age. Why they're assumed to eat corn chips and drink soda WHILE they sit on tractors is what eludes me.
If you stop subsidizing gran, the tractor goes back in the shed. Got that. Why does that make their medical costs go down? Is there a reason to assume they're going to get construction jobs or become professional athletes or aerobics instructors?
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