# France and Brazil's War on Poverty !!!

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/france-and-brazils-war-on-poverty/265311>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [September 21, 2004, 12:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/france-and-brazils-war-on-poverty/265311 "2004-09-21T12:14:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![Asteroide](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/87869e/32.png) [@Asteroide](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Asteroide)\
**Post date:** [September 24, 2004, 10:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/france-and-brazils-war-on-poverty/265311/41 "2004-09-24T10:26:56Z")

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> [@Dead Badger](#):
>
> Once you factor in the proportion of our tax money that has already paid for the food, absolutely. The price at the till is not the whole story, and fundamentally subsidies exist to force us to buy goods that could be more economically produced elsewhere. Before you buy any subsidised product in a supermarket, you have already paid for a significant proportion of its production through your taxes; enough to make the price at the till equal to or lower than that of imported goods. If the subsidy is removed, you’ll be paying a similar price at the till to before, but you won’t be paying extra in tax.

Well, that would create a consumer advantage in the wealthy countries and also allow food products from poorer countries to become more competitive (assuming we didn’t just slap higher tariffs and tighter quotas on food imports).

On the other hand, this would put the poorer countries in the position of exporting more food (maybe a good thing, maybe not) and it would make the wealthy countries more dependent on food imports - which is strategically unacceptable (cf oil).

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**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\
**Post date:** [September 24, 2004, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/france-and-brazils-war-on-poverty/265311/42 "2004-09-24T14:47:30Z")

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> [@SentientMeat](#):
>
> Terrorism kills _how many_ people per year? A few thousand?
> 
> Poverty kills **millions**.

Yes but those millions are POOR people. Generally more wealthy people are killed by terrorists.

:rolleyes:

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