> How is subsidizing food producers any different than giving everyone money to buy food? Subsidizing production by incentivizing number of units is different

> How is subsidizing food producers any different than giving everyone money to buy food? Subsidizing production by incentivizing number of units is different from just creating demand and waiting for producers to match up. By incentivizing number of units of production, say x% incentive for per 1000 bushels of corn AFTER 10k bushels, you are literally incentivizing production of food and suppressing prices. You are asking farmers to use as much land as possible to produce corn. This is assuming that there is a shortage of corn in the market. In this way, the market is flooded with cheap corn and prevents recession caused by corn. The benefit of this approach is that something useful actually got produced besides money. By only creating demand, production is not guaranteed to ramp up. Many farmers will be happy to take more dollars for the same amount of corn, causing inflation, thus causing fed to raise rates, thus causing recession. The disadvantage of this is that nothing got produced except money. This fiscal support should be timeboxed (say 1-year during a recession) to prvent the big ag monopolies you are talking about. We don't even need to think in hypotheticals. Today, the biggest cause of inflation (and thus fed rate hikes and thus recession) is housing. There is some merit to raising rates and flattening demand. But the biggest solution would be to flood the market with supply of housing. Just incentivize builders to build 2 million units within a year with fiscal policy and bam, inflation is gone.