Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "Why Farmers Protests are Spreading to Spain, Italy and Greece" video.

  1.  @QwoaX  You're wrong. Farmers don't profit from the first, they are only producers. The ones profitting from high food prices are distributors, particularly supermarkets, who keep purchase price low because of their market power and sale price high because of market concentration.
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  2. Absolutely have. Remember, the Dutch wanted to significantly reduce their total livestock. Imagine being a diary farmer under such conditions!
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  3. What they mean is, whether you can effectively tax people more. There's a law in economics, can't remember the name now, that says, that if you increase tax rate beyond certain point, you'll generate LESS revenue, because people will stop buying the stuff they originally consumed and, if they are able to, they'll substitute it with something else. Well, if you increase taxes that hit everything, people will start saving more money, because whatever they could spend it on would become too expensive to justify buying them and the economy slows down in general, which down the line could even lead to bankruptcies of companies, layoffs and further decrease in consumption caused by lower disposable income in the economy. Meaning you could start a deflationary spiral and there is no coming back from that without heads of minister of finance and governor of central bank (at minimum) rolling. Tax wise and by extension subsidies wise, this means, that you will lower the support you can pay out to the farmers, because you increased how aggressively you've been taking money from peoples purses. And it doesn't matter, whether you target income or consumption taxes. Real after taxes income will be the same and that is what will determine consumption in economy and by extension total tax revenue and redistributable portion of it into agro subsidies.
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  4. There is no irony there. A lot of the policies are aimed at reducing production, however, prices farmers manage to get out of distributors are so small, they'd go bankrupt and the EU is creating such conditions, that farmers can't find more money for them selves from efficiencies. With green BS in place, there'd be no food production long before the climate made it economically unfeasible to grow it in Europe, simply, because the most efficient methods will be banned here.
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