Tell Americans What They're Really Paying for Their Food
Spread over tens of millions of consumers, [subsidy] costs seem small: the average American taxpayer, for example, pays only $322 each year to fund subsidies. But for some of the thousands of farmers who get such payments, the benefits are huge: from 1995 to 2005, roughly 75 percent of subsidy payments went to just 10 percent of the subsidy recipients, who took in an average of $91,000 a year; and 55 farmers received more than $1 million each.
Farm (and tobacco) subsidies, depressingly, are just one of those things that I don’t think will ever change in America.
