On 6/30/01 7:31 PM, "Tiberius Gracchus" <cryofan@mylinuxisp.com> wrote:
>
> The farmers got their subsidies many years ago, when there were
> actually a halfway decent reasons for the subsidies.
> They keep the subsidies because
>
> 1. they live in rural areas and have greater representation per capita
> in the Senate than do urban areas.
This isn't true. The largest agricultural states also happen to be some of
the most populous (e.g. California and Texas), and the number of people in
rural areas in these states are dwarfed by the number that live in the
cities. And for many of the largely rural states west of the Rockies,
mining is more important economically than agriculture anyway. There are
simply very few states that actually have a substantial fraction of their
population working in agriculture or that aren't dominated by a large city.
There might be a couple states in the mid-west that you could legitimately
characterize this way (North Dakota? Iowa?), but not many, and certainly not
enough to ramrod something through the Senate.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:39:41 MDT