Yeah... no. Law of unintended consequences will bite you hard in the ass with this idea.
Personally, I don't believe we should be using tax dollars to subsidize anything. But then, here in reality, that ain't going to happen. So, let's subsidize the stuff that is going to make the country better in the long term. We blow $80 Billion on corn every year. King Corn For what? We spend upwards of $100 billion a year on oil subsidies. $20 billion on sugar. What good do these things do for us long term? I'd rather be investing that cash into molten salt thorium reactors, solar panels, high density battery technologies, asteroid mining and stem cell organ growing. We have a ton of money in the USA, we just are not good at spending it wisely.
Ahem The United States blows a shit-ton of money on corn because corn is a ridiculously shippable, storable source of calories that can be used in soft power diplomacy. "Hedgerow to hedgerow" was about carrot-sticking the Soviet Union during their catastrophic draughts. 'member back in like '06 or whatever when the Bush Administration was all about gasahol and there were food riots in Venezuela and China and shit? Or the rice riots in 2008? The US subsidizes the fuck out of grain so that we can splash it around like a whale in Vegas. I'm not as up on the sugar subsidies but I'd reckon it's something similar. As far as oil, that's a little trickier because the US only started exporting oil recently... but in addition to being the world's largest oil and gas producer, four of the eleven largest refinery complexes in the world are in Texas or Louisiana. It's mostly foreign oil they process, too - the US has far more control over the world's energy supply than people give it credit for. By design. The defense budget for the United States in 2016 is $598 billion. By way of comparison, we spend a third of that on food and energy subsidies. Which do you think is a more cost-effective method for exercising foreign policy? Now - I'm not saying this is moral. I'm not saying this is ideal. I'm not saying I wouldn't change it - I'd want to talk to a whole bunch of smart people before I even thought about it. But I've found that the more I dig into things, the more the stupid ways of our world make sense.
So, my brain is odd. What follows is stuff that you almost certainly are familiar with, but I am going to type this out for my benefit, as well as the audience if interested. Time had this debate in 1980. For some reason, in my head I don't equate corn as 'grain' even though corn is a grass, a grain and a basic food staple. When I think of grain, I think of wheat, rye, barley, rice, but for some reason, not corn. One of the really great things that Carter did was use grain to drag the Soviets to the SALT II table and agree to end new missile developments. This plan was so successful you end up with TIme talking about weaponizing food. I once heard a great talk from a guy who lost everything in the Reagan Farm program where the government auctioned off family farms left and right who said that Reagan shot them all in the back after Carter's Embargo cut them off at the knees and left them with tons of high-interest debt and suddenly no customers. But these guys were all wheat and 'grain" farmers, and I never in my head made that link to corn. Found a page that does not look like a 90's Geocities regect Sugar subsidies, bty, are solely to fuck Cuba. They started in the late 50's as a way to hurt Cuban exports when the Castros took control of the country. This is why I tell people that the world is not black and white, never was that way and can never be. Tom Freidman has a point that the increase in global trade has done more for world peace and an end to major wars than anything else, and I tend in very broad strokes to agree with him. China is not going to go to war with the US any time soon... not to say there will be pot shots here and there, but it is too profitable to stay in the WTO framework. Its one of these things that now we are stuck with and it gives the impression that no matter what we do we end up just punching the tar baby harder. Hopefully I won't be around if the whole thing goes off the rails or we get a set of incompetent egomaniacs in charge.Now - I'm not saying this is moral. I'm not saying this is ideal. I'm not saying I wouldn't change it - I'd want to talk to a whole bunch of smart people before I even thought about it. But I've found that the more I dig into things, the more the stupid ways of our world make sense.