Andrew Samwick has some problems with a New York Times article that "explains" how government farm policy helps the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Andrew sets them straight.
The reporter (Timothy Egan) clearly has a view that the subsidy system is not adequately helping small and medium-sized farms. He even marshals bad statistics to support his case. Consider the next paragraph:
But because nearly 70 percent of the subsidies go to the top 10 percent of agricultural producers, the recent prosperity is not seen or felt among many small to medium-size growers who keep the struggling counties of the Great Plains alive...
Using the article's own statistics, Samwick does a quick calculation.
So if we have 2.1 million farms, the top 10 percent would be 210,000. But it only takes 150,000 of them to get to the 70 percent of production (assuming these "major food crops" are analogous to the "agricultural producers" above). So this means that even though the top 10 percent produce more than 70 percent of the crops, they only get 70 percent of the subsidies. I don't believe that the article provides any evidence that the subsidies are distributed in accord with anything other than total production. It may be true--but the article hasn't shown it.
Of course, both Vox Baby and the Times article raise questions about the design of a policy that has agricultural subsidies growing at multiples of the rate of GDP growth at a time when farm incomes are at record levels. Read the whole post.