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Comment by nuisance-bear | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we shouldn't burn ethanol in cars. Maybe we shouldn't load up every food product with corn syrup.

Corn in the US is heavily subsidized. It's why corn syrup is so prevalent in US foods, because the subsidies mean it's cheaper than any other sources of sugar.

In the US, Iowa is the largest producer of corn [1] (producing nearly 40% more than the next, Illinois,) and thus the greatest beneficiary of those corn subsidies. Could we reduce those corn subsidies? No, it's politically nonviable, in part because Iowa has enshrined in its laws that it must have the first primaries in the US [2][3]. No candidate that has ever said anything against corn subsidies has won a primary.

[1] https://www.cropprophet.com/what-state-produces-the-most-cor...

[2] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-iowa-and-new-hampshi...

[3] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/01/why-the-iowa-cau...

And if you believe in a link between obesity, diabetes, and the prevalence of corn products in our food, the chain of causality looks even worse.

Big corn. Amazing plants have enslaved us.

There’s a brilliant chapter in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind about how as we domesticated wheat, it domesticated humans in return. Grains are thought to have been dropped along trade routes which allowed for humans to be less nomadic as crops became established. Then we got comfortable. Fascinating to think about.

> Corn in the US is heavily subsidized.

So is oil. So farming corn is actually subsidized at-least twice!

> Iowa has enshrined in its laws that it must have the first primaries in the US

I'm confused, how can a single state unilaterally require that its primary is the earliest in the nation? What's to prevent another state from passing a law that its primary must be one day before Iowa's?

Does this mean that if another state organizes a primary earlier than Iowa's primary, that Iowa will reschedule their primary to be even earlier than the other state?

This is basically what happened in 2008.

They can't stop other states from competing to be first.

If another state scheduled their's ahead of Iowa's, Iowa's state officials would be legally required to reschedule Iowa's ahead of this other state's.

It would be super fun if another state passed a similar law.

Infinite corecursion!

[edit] apparently corecursion isn't the correct term for when two functions call each other recursively? I thought there was a term for it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_recursion

Thanks!

is it bad of me that I want this to happen to end the madness. I can just imagine Iowa trying to sue another state for doing this.

I want this to happen too

They wouldn't have to. At the national conventions all delegates from states that go before iowa will be unable to vote by the existing rules and that limits what States would even be willing to try.

> I'm confused, how can a single state unilaterally require that its primary is the earliest in the nation?

It can’t, it requires cooperation of the other states.

This claim, often repeated, is misleading to the point of dishonesty.

Corn isn't really subsidized, and iowa corn farmers are not the benefactors of the agricultural bills. Cattle producers and chemical corporations are subsidized, and the way they're subsidized is by a myriad set of policies which encourage grain prices to stay very low. This makes cattle feed cheap and corn and soy inputs to chemical plants cheap.

If the price of corn doubled, farmers could afford to pay their mortgage and taxes without trying to extract every bit of possible yield. But then the price of beef would go up and the profits of 3M and Dupont would go down, and that's a far more powerful force than farmers in Iowa.

I don't know much about direct corn subsidies, but we could talk about sugar tariffs -- which you could interpret as a subsidy to any substitute product producer -- like maybe corn syrup producers.

I'm kind of puzzled by this. Your post defies conventional wisdom (which you say is misleading). I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because conventional wisdom is often misleading. But these links seem to indicate that in fact corn farmers ARE directly subsidized, both in terms of crop insurance (cheaper than market insurance is clearly a subsidy), as well as price protection. See that second link, especially ARC and PLC, which compensates farmers if their prices fall below benchmark rates set by Congress.

Is that not a direct subsidy? Are they wrong? (genuinely curious - your post is interesting enough that I felt I had to do some research to clarify my own thinking)

https://www.cato.org/commentary/examining-americas-farm-subs...

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies

Subsidies have transitioned away from direct payments to subsidized insurance. The insurance isn’t just about natural disasters or crop loss, it guarantees minimum revenue based on farmed area, basically resulting in direct payments whenever prices are low. That has been successfully rebranded as “not a subsidy”.

https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=corn

The second link here is a deeply biased political position advocacy opinion piece, so it's a little bit onerous to 'refute' because every section is sort of a misleading half-truth. (I'm not sure what the best example would be, but I'm sure you've read something before where an author was cherry-picking statistics or casting factual elements in dishonest light so that they could support their stance, whether that was about vaccines or immigration or encryption or guns or whatever).

One thing that it does get right, is the section "they induce overproduction, inflate land prices, and harm the environment" which is absolutely true. My point in my previous post was that this systemic overproduction is to the benefit of corn buyers (cattle production, food processors, etc) and the detriment of corn producers.

In essence, the aggregate result of the myriad laws and programs impacting agricultural production is that grain producing farmers are left sitting helpless on a knife's edge. The only way to avoid bankruptcy is to pump your land full of petrochemicals to maximize yield. ARC is based on revenue, not profitability- it's encouraging high-cost, high-yield farming practices to guarantee plentiful grain supply to buyers. PLC is even more brazen- after completely distorting the true market price for animal feed by forcing grain growers to overproduce, we let them buy corn for less than it costs to grow and then force the farmers to rely on an insurance payment that's just enough to cover their debt & tax payments.

Basically, the grain producers are pawns in the ag subsidy game and the grain buyers are the kings.

The government subsidies on corn pushes Iowa farmers to produce more than normal (depleting the soil faster) and sell their corn regardless of the market price. This is mostly done at the behest of other industries and huge food corporation lobbyists. It's a perverse economic incentive to say the least. I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I also don't think there's a bright line between corn subsidies and Iowa somehow playing kingmaker in the caucuses.

It’s my understanding that these subsidies came into existence in the Great Depression when farming was unprofitable even while people were starving. The government came to the realization that free market forces are not enough to stabilize the supply of food, and when food becomes unavailable... bad things happen. Car companies can go out of business and the country will survive, airlines can fail and the country will survive, movie theaters can go bankrupt and the country will survive, but food? That’s an existential crisis for the whole nation. When large masses of people start to starve, you’re looking at political change. You don’t fuck around with your food supply. You can’t just leave that up to supply and demand. Hence it’s subsidized and managed.

if you think about it, it is ridiculous that we burn food as fuel in our cars and add unhealthy amount of sugar syrup into everything

Food is fuel, always has been. An internal combustion engine is efficent compared to biological processes of motion.

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