Northwest Texas Panhandle | Gotta love balanced news reports. According to this report the average family income this year from farming is going to be $89,000 and on top of that millions of dollars of taxpayers money will be distributed to these families. I enjoyed how they emphasized the total amount going to every family to make the number seem huge compared to the total amount each person's taxes. $89,000 for a family isn't that much money especially if this is a time of high priced grains. Of course then there was the part about how dealers couldn't keep enough "huge" (or some term similar to that) $175,000 tractors on their lots. They were being bought too quickly. There was a little in there about how fuel and fertilizer inputs were going up but it was greatly downplayed. The best part of it was when the farmer talked about how we've got to have a good year some time and then it went on to how subsidies should be cut all together because agriculture is having a good year. Now I'm not a big fan of subsidies but in some cases they are needed. Not every farmer grows 150+ bushel dryland corn and the price of corn won't always be "high". There are so many different farms in the U.S. that there is no one-size-fits-all perfect solution. Anyway, this news story really was definitely bad publicity for the farmer.
Edited by reznik 5/1/2008 22:25
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ABC news talking about farm income
