<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>VBprogrammer</author><text>While you guys throw tariffs on food here and cut subsidies are any of you aware that for some 10% of American&amp;#x27;s having food on the table is not a given?&lt;p&gt;Now I&amp;#x27;m not saying that subsidising farmers to produce huge crops of the same 3 crops is the best way of continuing to ensure no one goes hungry, it self evidently doesn&amp;#x27;t work given the current status quo.&lt;p&gt;However, to talk about making huge changes to these systems without stopping to consider what impact it will have on that part of society is an incredibly rose tinted view of the world.</text><parent_chain><item><author>bushbaba</author><text>You could also just have large import tariffs on food.&lt;p&gt;I’m honestly suprised the us doesn’t just have a 25%+ import tariff. Would quickly cause more domestic manufacturing.&lt;p&gt;Like why do we even import garlic from China. We have plenty of domestic ability to produce.</text></item><item><author>ascar</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a reasonable argument that government subsidies for farmers reduce prices for the consumer, but I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s necessarily a correct assumption.&lt;p&gt;Subsidies help the local farmers to compete with farmers in low cost countries. Transportation costs are usually insignificant.
So without subsidies the consumer might pay the same price, but the store just ends up sourcing the product from a different country. However, having a significant amount of food production locally has obvious strategic benefits (and I don&amp;#x27;t mean just war, even a draught could create sufficient shortages)</text></item><item><author>danShumway</author><text>Even if we ignore externalities and pollution costs, just stop outright subsidizing animal meat production so much. The reason meat is so cheap is because our government puts a lot of effort and money into making it cheap.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know why more people aren&amp;#x27;t trying to sell this to the &amp;quot;free market&amp;quot; crowd as government overreach. The reality right now is that plant-based protein is gaining popularity despite the market being artificially biased against it in terms of price. Animal meat &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; cost more than it does, not just in the sense of &amp;quot;you&amp;#x27;re not paying for the true environmental cost&amp;quot;, but also in the sense of, &amp;quot;you&amp;#x27;re not paying the actual monetary cost it takes to produce this product.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The US government throws billions of dollars into subsidizing meat and dairy production every year. Plant-based protein&amp;#x27;s growth is restricted in part because our food prices and production aren&amp;#x27;t determined just by the free market. That&amp;#x27;s not necessarily &lt;i&gt;bad&lt;/i&gt;, but if we&amp;#x27;re going to be messing with the market anyway we could choose to subsidize other things.&lt;p&gt;And we could obviously do more than just lowering subsidies, I&amp;#x27;m not saying we should ignore externalities or that we should just completely abandon all subsidies entirely. But I am saying we shouldn&amp;#x27;t pretend that meat actually costs what we see in the store. Meat is cheap because (for various reasons) as a society we&amp;#x27;ve all collectively decided to spend tax money so that we can pretend that it costs very little to produce.</text></item><item><author>hannob</author><text>Interestingly it doesn&amp;#x27;t even discuss the obvious solution: Let people who buy real meat pay for the externalities. (Interestingly even in places where there&amp;#x27;s some form of carbon pricing - like the EU - this often doesn&amp;#x27;t cover a large share of emissions from meat production, as methane emissions are very relevant here - I&amp;#x27;m not aware of any methane pricing scheme anywhere.)</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>How to lower the price of plant-based meat</title><url>https://us14.campaign-archive.com/?u=66df320da8400b581cbc1b539&amp;id=cea38367f1</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>Wolfenstein98k</author><text>Same reason everything else that is imported is imported - comparative advantage.&lt;p&gt;Take the logic of &amp;quot;grow all your food at home&amp;quot; too seriously and you end up like this guy:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.smithsonianmag.com&amp;#x2F;smart-news&amp;#x2F;making-sandwich-scratch-took-man-six-months-180956674&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.smithsonianmag.com&amp;#x2F;smart-news&amp;#x2F;making-sandwich-sc...&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>bushbaba</author><text>You could also just have large import tariffs on food.&lt;p&gt;I’m honestly suprised the us doesn’t just have a 25%+ import tariff. Would quickly cause more domestic manufacturing.&lt;p&gt;Like why do we even import garlic from China. We have plenty of domestic ability to produce.</text></item><item><author>ascar</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a reasonable argument that government subsidies for farmers reduce prices for the consumer, but I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s necessarily a correct assumption.&lt;p&gt;Subsidies help the local farmers to compete with farmers in low cost countries. Transportation costs are usually insignificant.
So without subsidies the consumer might pay the same price, but the store just ends up sourcing the product from a different country. However, having a significant amount of food production locally has obvious strategic benefits (and I don&amp;#x27;t mean just war, even a draught could create sufficient shortages)</text></item><item><author>danShumway</author><text>Even if we ignore externalities and pollution costs, just stop outright subsidizing animal meat production so much. The reason meat is so cheap is because our government puts a lot of effort and money into making it cheap.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know why more people aren&amp;#x27;t trying to sell this to the &amp;quot;free market&amp;quot; crowd as government overreach. The reality right now is that plant-based protein is gaining popularity despite the market being artificially biased against it in terms of price. Animal meat &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; cost more than it does, not just in the sense of &amp;quot;you&amp;#x27;re not paying for the true environmental cost&amp;quot;, but also in the sense of, &amp;quot;you&amp;#x27;re not paying the actual monetary cost it takes to produce this product.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The US government throws billions of dollars into subsidizing meat and dairy production every year. Plant-based protein&amp;#x27;s growth is restricted in part because our food prices and production aren&amp;#x27;t determined just by the free market. That&amp;#x27;s not necessarily &lt;i&gt;bad&lt;/i&gt;, but if we&amp;#x27;re going to be messing with the market anyway we could choose to subsidize other things.&lt;p&gt;And we could obviously do more than just lowering subsidies, I&amp;#x27;m not saying we should ignore externalities or that we should just completely abandon all subsidies entirely. But I am saying we shouldn&amp;#x27;t pretend that meat actually costs what we see in the store. Meat is cheap because (for various reasons) as a society we&amp;#x27;ve all collectively decided to spend tax money so that we can pretend that it costs very little to produce.</text></item><item><author>hannob</author><text>Interestingly it doesn&amp;#x27;t even discuss the obvious solution: Let people who buy real meat pay for the externalities. (Interestingly even in places where there&amp;#x27;s some form of carbon pricing - like the EU - this often doesn&amp;#x27;t cover a large share of emissions from meat production, as methane emissions are very relevant here - I&amp;#x27;m not aware of any methane pricing scheme anywhere.)</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>How to lower the price of plant-based meat</title><url>https://us14.campaign-archive.com/?u=66df320da8400b581cbc1b539&amp;id=cea38367f1</url></story>