They also have access to all the ports importing phosphorus used in the supply chain to produce the fertilizer necessary for the red states to achieve such high yields.
It turns out that the modern world has an infinitely more complex economy and supply chain than just wheat and money
This has largely been a settled argument for about 10k years, as we transitioned to agriculture.
Most people prefer buying wheat to growing it.
Even harder to grow it in meaningful quantities on a subsistence farming basis.
> It's even harder to buy wheat when no one will sell to you.
Which, unless your plan is to blockade the blue states, Canada and Brazil will happily do.
Yes, and your proposed plan - the subsidized states refusing to sell the food to the subsidising ones - removes that reason entirely.
Blue states would see inflation. Red states would see an economic collapse.
And blue states will retaliate. Need medical care? Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Bristol-Myers Squibb are all HQed in New Jersey, Pfizer in NYC, AbbVie in Chicago…
We know who wins in trade wars. No one.
I'm not really sure why my points have received so much push back, but OP received basically none at all for offering essentially a symmetrical argument to my own.
They are quite well subsidized, yes.
https://apnews.com/article/north-america-business-local-taxe...
> Connecticut residents paid an average of $15,643 per person in federal taxes in 2015, according to a report by the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Massachusetts paid $13,582 per person, New Jersey paid $13,137 and New York paid $12,820.
> At the other end, Mississippi residents paid an average of $5,740 per person, while West Virginia paid $6,349, Kentucky paid $6,626 and South Carolina paid $6,665.
> Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington in 2015, according to the Rockefeller study. West Virginia received $2.07, Kentucky got $1.90 and South Carolina got $1.71.
> Meanwhile, New Jersey received 74 cents in federal spending for tax every dollar the state sent to Washington. New York received 81 cents, Connecticut received 82 cents and Massachusetts received 83 cents.
We like this setup, but I suspect blue states have more options for grain than red states have for doctors.
Also, as a general point, merely looking at total subsidy amount means nothing without looking at the reason for the subsidy. For example, if America builds a $10B early ICBM detection facility in Alaska, it will look like America is heavily subsidizing Alaska. Except, Alaska isn't actually a real threat to be nuked - NY, SF, LA, and DC are the ones that benefit.
If you think Kansas will be happy with graduates of Afghan medical schools, by all means go for it.
Being a doctor is highly incentivized financially and culturally and we haven’t seen anywhere near that level of efficiency gains of training doctors.
At minimum each new doctor needs ~26 years to get to our standards. Lower it by a fuck ton, go a crazy as you want and you still are on a decade plus from deciding to mint a new dr to having your doogie bowser diagnosing people.
This is the same fucking mistake the South made during the civil war[1]. The red states do not appear to understand what it takes to run a modern economy
[1] “The North can make a steam engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth - right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.”
Not if you have the money.
> It's even harder to buy wheat when no one will sell to you.
Yeah, but the world is more than the US, and as well as money, the blue states have ports.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor
> In 1990, the average real farm wage for nonsupervisory crop and livestock workers was just over half the average real wage in the nonfarm economy for private-sector nonsupervisory occupations ($11.71 versus $23.19, in 2023 dollars). By 2023, the farm wage ($17.55) was equal to 61 percent of the nonfarm wage ($28.93). In other words, the gap between farm and nonfarm wages is slowly shrinking, but still substantial.
> The share of hired crop farmworkers who were not legally authorized to work in the United States grew from roughly 14 percent in 1989–91 to almost 55 percent in 1999–2001; in recent years it has declined to about 40 percent. In 2020–22, 32 percent of crop farmworkers were U.S. born, 7 percent were immigrants who had obtained U.S. citizenship, 19 percent were other authorized immigrants (primarily permanent residents or green-card holders), and the remaining 42 percent held no work authorization.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/wh...
We already can't find enough labor:
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farm-labor-guestworke...
and unemployment is historically very low.
Is your argument that if we kicked every illegal immigrant out of America tomorrow, that Americans would just choose to starve instead of paying slightly more for food, and farmers would just let food rot on the vine instead of harvesting it?
Oh, they wouldn't choose. They'd just have that as the inevitable consequence. Famines happen; just wishing them away isn't really a great approach.
It doesn't help that these decisions take months/years to show their impacts.
In this scenario, some farmer is going to choose to pay $20/hr for farm workers, and rake in insane profits if there really is a famine. In fact, almost all farms would choose to pay more to collect their food and sell it at a large premium in the case of a food shortage.
And hope that in six months, the trade war hasn't been settled? They won't be paid until the crop matures, and there's a lot of labor before that point. You're also competing with other countries, from whom we already import agricultural goods at reasonable prices.
Again, decisions that lead to famine don't do so instantly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
You're full of easy solutions to tough problems, aren't you?