is a farming subsidy the same thing as corporate welfare?
No. They look the same because federal dollars get disbursed to (usually) wealthy recipients – like The Big Three in Detroit taking huge sums of tax-funded bailout money, the wealthiest 10% of farms receive 60% of farm subsidies (a claim for which I have not seen impartial evidence, but which we will accept as true for the sake of argument because a) the disbursements don’t change the nature of what a subsidy is and b) Jenci Spradlin has never lied to me before, and I don’t expect she has now). So the sticking point is this: what is a subsidy? Aside from being a politically-charged word used by the establishment and grass-tops Right to chide profligate federal spending – and yes, there is a problem with profligate federal spending, but it has little to do with farming subsidies – a Pigovian subsidy is a policy tool that incentivizes behaviors which benefit society at large. Okay, we’ll bite. What does that mean? Well, take the market for corn, for example. Corn subsidies are paid to co
