this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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The reasons for farm subsidies are.. Debatable. If you keep food cheap people don't notice currency debasement as much. Personally I think it might make more sense for prices to rise to a point where farmers are profitable without subsidies. Those subsidies are value extracted from the tax payer anyway.. You're paying for it.
You're right too in that buses and trains are a lot cheaper and should always out compete cars. How much do you think fares would have to rise to make public transport self sufficient ? Make it so it funds its own expansion and service improvement.
The Toronto Transport Commission is my local example. From what I can napkin math they get about 1 billion dollars in subsidies per year from the city (maybe some provincial and fed money too.. I rounded up generously). They collect a little over 700k fares a day. Wouldn't take much of an increase with like almost 250 million fares a year to close that gap.
Privatize the roads and have cars users pay their share of that infrastructure cost and get the burden off of working people and I bet a small share increase would be pretty affordable.
The farm subsidies are to ensure enough farms are profitable enough to have an excess in the event we lose a ton of farmland or crop. If something happened we would not bounce back fast enough if we did not have excess, and excess would not happen if the free market pushed prices so high or low that the change in demand caused people to stop farming.
On the subject of bus fares, it's not that simple. If bus fares increase, some people will stop riding the bus and switch to cars or other forms of transport (or not go at all) which will likely reduce fares and possibly increase congestion which would slow down the busses which would cause less people to ride them which would...
I'm not saying that's exactly what would happen, I'm just saying you have to be careful. People only ride the bus when it's more affordable or more convenient
Ideally taxes are progressive, whereas food price increases are always regressive. That is to say that taxes affect the rich more, and food prices affect the poor more.