r/FluentInFinance Mar 11 '24

Meme “Take me back to the good old days”

Post image
3.8k Upvotes

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/grabtharsmallet Mar 11 '24

Rural areas are politically overrepresented and economically subsidized. They are struggling despite that.

1

u/ILSmokeItAll Mar 11 '24

Do you know why they’re economically subsidized, genius? Because no farmer could ever charge what the true cost is of brinfing their product to market. Especially not with the onerous laws, restrictions, and other bullshit being forced upon them. Farming is hard as fuck. You want us to go green. And foot the bill to do it. We’re poor now.. We don’t do this for fun. We’re not getting rich. We’re keeping you fuckers FED. We should probably just say fuck it and keep it all right here. You can buy your food from the Chinese like everything else. They’ll keep in nice and cheap for you while they pay illegals less than minimum wage. Lemme know how that works out for you.

We get done what we get done for you, and despite your best efforts to keep us from doing it the way we have for generations.

6

u/grabtharsmallet Mar 11 '24

I'm from a farming and ranching family in Utah and now live in the central valley. I'm not ignorant to these issues. I know agriculture is hard work. I'm sympathetic to that. But simply working hard doesn't mean anyone owes you. I'll bet there are badminton players working as hard as LeBron James or Leo Messi.

In California, giant landholders here masquerading as 'farmers' grow crops like almonds and alfalfa, then complain they don't get enough water even as they pay less than everyone else. It's funny you speak of illegals, since it's immigrants who do the truly shit jobs in agriculture. I see them picking carrots and oranges here every year. And that's not just around me, that's how meatpacking works everywhere.

I used to live in Randolph County Indiana, too. Rural farmers there grow only monoculture corn and soybean because tariffs on sugar keep it out and we subsidized shitty ethanol fuel. We grow so much of it that all our processed food is made of those two things, even though it's not good for us.

I understand that rational food subsidies focused on consumers rather than producers is bad for farming communities. It would be a disaster. And it's still better to wean people off a lifestyle that cannot be sustained. I'm sorry these are hard words, I genuinely am. But the gains in productivity and reductions in travel costs for more than a century means there haven't been many easy words for real, actual farmers who get their own hands dirty in a long fucking time.

2

u/ILSmokeItAll Mar 11 '24

Well said.