The U.S.’s 2.5 Billion Pounds of Surplus Meat, Visualized
31st July 2018
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This is all purchased by the government using taxpayer money to support the price of the products involved, among many such ‘price support’ programs. Of course, once the government buys the stuff, it has to figure out what to do with it, preferably before it goes bad. Considering the cost of storage and the salaries of bureaucrats paid to baby-sit it, it would have been cheaper just to cut the farmers a check — except that doing so would have pulled the curtain back on these buy-your-vote scams.
Of course, they could always give it to starving people overseas, but then the local producers would be up in arms and the foreign government would bitch and moan because they control their populations by controlling the food supply (See Zimbabwe.) So there’s no way to win this one.