Not long after Clayton Tucker “founded” a ranch, he joined the Texas Farmer’s Union AND the National Farmer’s Union! After all, if he was a failure at ranching, someone else must be to blame.
He chooses to blame “Big Ag!”
It’s not his lack of experience, lack of effort, laziness or the fact he spends his time gallivanting in D.C. while his goat kids die back home. No no no. It’s because “Big Ag” is ripping him off and being greedy by taking all the profits!
[We’ll ignore for the moment that Comrade Trust Fund Tucker could just start a website or go to farmers’ markets and sell meat DIRECTLY to consumers, like my friends at Winters’ Beef have been doing for YEARS. He’s too lazy for that, too!]
Comrade Clayton LOVES this stat, and repeats it constantly like a retarded Mynah bird. It makes HIM into the victim and absolves him of all his personal failures and inability to fend for himself in life. It excuses the fact he is still living in mom’s womb at age 33.
[You’d NEVER see a real rancher like Mark Langford pull this pussy move]
Unfortunately for Trust Fund Tucker, that stat is extremely misleading – like all his ‘facts.’
The 10-year average for national farm income is $101.5 billion. Wanna know what it was in 2022? It was $182.8 billion! In 2023 it was $151 billion!
Both of those are FAR above the 10-year average. So the farmer is making more money than ever, in terms of gross nominal dollars. I’ll pause for a moment while Comrade Clayton goes and looks up what “nominal dollars” are….
….ok, you ready?
The trick to Trust Fund Tucker’s misleading stat is that he quotes the farm/ranch income in terms of a RATIO and compares it to “total food dollars spent.” He also has the stat wrong and uses “in the grocery store” as the denominator in this ratio. The REAL stat is “every dollar spent on food.” And guess what? Those dollars include restaurants and other highly-processed end uses.
So if farmers are making WAY more than ever, how can that ratio be going DOWN? Well, one way is if the denominator goes way UP even more.
I’ll give a REAL simple example so even a dipshit like Comrade Clayton can understand it with his $80,000 International Relations degree:
Let’s say it is 1980 and 3rd generation Tucker sells his beef for $2 a pound. I have no idea if these are accurate prices for that era, but it doesn’t matter – it’s the RATIO that counts.
It gets processed, packaged, transported, etc – which all costs money! Hey, according to Comrade Clayton EVERYONE deserves a dignified wage AND full health care. I assume that means the guys at the meatpacking plant and delivery trucks, right Comrade?
Anyways, lets’ say that $2 of Tucker beef shows up at the butcher and is sold for $4. We then can see that Tucker got $2 of the FINAL $4 price – or 50%. Wow! Good job, buddy. Tucker’s $2 is the numerator and the FINAL price is the denominator of $4. Otherwise stated as 2/4 or 1/2 or .50 or 50%…correct?
Now fast forward to the 2020s. People eat out a LOT more than they did in the 1980s. I know this because I lived through it while Comrade Clayton was still just a rotten egg in mommy’s ovary. It was a HUGE treat to go to McDonald’s. We maybe went once a month. I’d say 90% of our dinners were home-cooked by mom. She’d go buy a pork loin at Publix or chicken or whatever and do all the work preparing it HERSELF.
Furthermore, there weren’t Applebee’s and Chili’s and Olive Gardens on every corner back then. We had maybe 2 or 3 “nice” restaurants in our town in 1980 and we’d go on Christmas Eve or Easter or other special occasions.
NOW, these spoiled Gen Z pussies order Door Dash takeouts 4x a week and rarely cook at home. Which means a LOT more work goes into that final product they consume. But guess what, those inflated numbers are still counted as “money spent on food” in the denominator.
Prices at restaurants have SOARED, thanks mainly to forced increases in minimum wage. Those massive wage increases were championed by idiots like Clayton Tucker HIMSELF!! How’s THAT for irony!
A Chipotle Double Steak Bowl Is Now $39 In California
So if Comrade Clayton sells $6 worth of beef in the year 2022 and it ends up at Flemming’s as a $50 steak, now he can cry that he only got 12% of the “food dollars spent” ($6/$50) even though he is actually making 200% MORE in nominal dollars!
See how that works??
Nice try, comrade. You keep spewing the bullshit and I’ll keep debunking it like I always have.
Here is a GREAT explanation of what I’m talking about:
Stop Paying Attention to the Farmers’ Share of the Food Dollar
Here is an excerpt:
The USDA breaks the food dollar down in a way that makes this easy to see. In 2021, of each dollar the consumer spent, on average 33.6 cents went to food services (restaurant workers and other nonfood costs), 15.2 cents to food processors, 12.7 cents to retailers, and 10.7 cents to wholesalers.3
Thus, farmers, at 14.5 cents, get more than grocery store operators or wholesalers and just slightly less than food processors. The biggest share goes to food services, because when we buy food in a restaurant, we typically pay three times more for our meal than the food on the plate costs the restaurant. Further, the restaurant’s food cost includes some nonfarm costs such as food processing, transportation, and wholesaling.
When the National Farmers Union and other agricultural groups routinely rail about big business taking advantage of farmers, they often cite the farmers’ share of the food dollar as evidence for their claims. The reality is that big business is not responsible for the downward trend in the farmers’ share of the food dollar. Rather, American consumers are to blame because they prioritize convenience over price at the grocery store.
In fact, farmers are being paid more than ever for their production.Inflation has certainly raised production expenses along with commodity prices, so over the longer term, net farm income (roughly, the farmers’ profits) has been holding steady or increasing slightly, but it is not falling.