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Conor Clarke

Conor Clarke - Conor Clarke is the editor, with Michael Kinsley, of Creative Capitalism. He was previously a fellow at The Atlantic and an editor at The Guardian. More

Conor Clarke is the editor, with Michael Kinsley, of Creative Capitalism, an economics blog that was recently published in book form by Simon and Schuster. He was previously a fellow at The Atlantic and an editor at The Guardian. He is also on Twitter.

The end of agriculture subsidies?

By Conor Clarke
Feb 24 2009, 9:54 PM ET Comment

Obama:

In this budget, we will [...] end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them.

I don't know what he means by "direct" and "large" (and "need") -- there is certainly ample room for interpretive fudging -- but I hope this is referring to the tens of billions of dollars that the US doles out each year in agricultural subsidies, much of which goes to farmers who don't actually farm. (For some of the many, many reasons why these subsidies are a terrible idea, see here.) This seems like one of those things about which there is economic consensus.


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