>I question Nathan Newman's assertion that farming subsides increase
>the price of food to the poor. Farming subsidies are designed to
>promote stable food prices, and in that they have largely succeeded.
>Most food staples have stayed well below the rate of inflation over
>the years. Anyway, farmers receive a small fraction of the price of
>processed foods; for example, approximately 5% of the price of a box
>of cereal goes to the farmer.
The issue is not whether prices have gone up; it's whether they would have fallen far more without subsidies and a number of trade barriers as well (notably sugar as an example of the latter). Farm productivity has gone up tremendously so the price per unit should have fallen far more and would have in a market without price supports; in fact, it is that reality that created the need for price supports in the first place to save family farms that could not compete in the capital-intensive competition of modern agriculture.
Looking at the price of cereal or other processed foods is a bit of a deceptive place to start, since there are many staples that would be much cheaper if the market set the price of food. Milk would be roughly half its retail price according to most analysts I have seen, while many other basic foods would also fall quite heavily. You may be correct that the overall food budget of many people might not fall as dramatically as those basic staples, but the question becomes why inner-city voters should want to pay an extra buck a gallon for milk, when those rural legislators keep voting to slash aid to the cities.
In the abstract, support for both the city poor and rural small farmer may be the progressive thing to do, but my analysis was on the breakdown of that alliance and why the electoral basis for that coalition had fallen apart. So-called suburban soccer moms often want to save that buck a gallon AND they want to cut aid to the city poor, so they can find alliances for those goals. It is the rise of the suburban vote cherry-picking alliances and the suburbanization of farm states themselves that has undermined rurual populism.
-- Nathan Newman