I had one of those new-car-proliferation moments today -- those rare times when you buy a new car and all of a sudden you notice that there are tons of that kind of car in that color driving on the road that you hadn't notice before. They didn't suddenly appear -- you just notice them now that they matter to you...
I've been doing some research into agricultural subsidies, and in similar fashion I saw this article in today's NY Times (requires free subscription). My interest is mostly with ethanol subsidies -- but all subsidies seem to be bad policy. They start for all the best reasons -- but evolve into very twisted and perverse programs after a while.
The original farming subsidies seemed to proliferate during the dust-bowl 1930's when a large portion of our population was agricultural and in desparate need of assistance. Dust-bowl conditions are long since gone, less than 5% of our population is in farming, and here we are providing $15+ billion of susidies under rigged conditions that have nothing to do with survival assistance (see the article regarding playing of futures markets vs. current price for deficiency payments).
