Obama promises $2T in budget cuts over 10 years

[Texsox]

In a lot of cases, I'm game for that. In some cases, I'm not. Our farm subsidy system is an absolute debacle of the highest order. It makes us all less healthy and wastes $100's of billions and is an environmental killer.

 

Care to explain?

 

How does keeping land from being developed, or left natural instead of being planted, harm the environment?

[Balta1701]

I should have said that I don't necessarily agree with the $4B being sent to the banks for this. They should have to compete just like every other market... and not be handed money. The only reason that they were handed this money was because no one wanted to lend, remember, and so the only way they would is if the government backed it.

 

Saw your edit: I so much agree on corn/ethanol. What a colossal waste.

Well, the issue with saying "they should have to compete" is that there's a reason why the federal government started the student loan program. The federal government decided, I believe rightly, that there was a tangible benefit to society to having more people and people of lesser means able to complete college, and they couldn't do so with typical loan repayment terms and schedules. Thus, the Feds started off a program to force lending to happen at lower rates and under more reasonable repayment terms, so that we could have more college grads, more doctors, and that people who deserve a chance at a degree could find a way to do it. Thus, the Federal government was deliberately undercutting the normal loans that people could otherwise have gotten. But, the program got reworked to give more money to the banks to do it, because banks have good lobbyists.

[Balta1701]

Care to explain?

 

How does keeping land from being developed, or left natural instead of being planted, harm the environment?

A number of ways. First of all, assume the world has a constant demand for food. A plot of land can produce a certain amount of food at a certain cost. But, if you raise the price, that plot of land can produce more food because you dump energy in to it in the form of fertilizers, chemicals, etc. This serves to waste a number of things. First, it wastes energy, because it takes an awful lot of energy to produce the fertilizers that let you get to higher production amounts. Second, it wastes money, because had the subsidy not been there, people in other countries could easily produce the necessary amount of food at lower costs (this is why the West's agriculture subsidies keep being the single most important issue derailing trade summit talks). And third, the environmental impact of high intensity farming is much greater than that of lower intensity farming, especially if its concentrated. By far the greatest example of this is the rapidly growing, gigantic Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Farmers throughout the heartland use a ton of fertilizer and various other chemicals. Those chemicals flush down the Mississippi river and in to the gulf. When they hit the gulf waters, they provide nutrients to areas that typically weren't growing a lot, and those fertilzer runoffs produce gigantic algal blooms that suck all of the oxygen out of the water, to the point that no animal life can survive within it (Fish swim in and suffocate.) Oh, and on top of that, pumping every single bit of farm production out of a parcel of land is just on principle bad for the land (see: the Dust Bowl) and can in the long term leave things in terrible shape.

 

So the environmental costs are; massive expenditures of energy in pumping up the production of the land, when the same amount of food could be produced without the subsidies, massive external pollution, and massive damage to the local ecosystems.

[mr_genius]

Even more reckless than Zachary Taylor?!

 

 

totally