Well, their interpretation is at odds with reality, and they should reconcile that. Regardless of what they told or what they believed, they paid into a system where they were forced to subsidize current recipients, while the system itself could be revoked at any point, leaving them high and dry, and not running into 14th Amendment issues or anything like that. See Flemming v. Nestor, 1960 - quoting Wiki:

Flemming v. Nestor, 363 U.S. 603 (1960), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the constitutionality of Section 1104 of the 1935 Social Security Act. In this Section, Congress reserved to itself the power to amend and revise the schedule of benefits. The Court rejected that Social Security is a system of ‘accrued property rights’ and held that those who pay into the system have no contractual right to receive what they have paid into it.[1]

Note that I’m not saying anything “should” be one way or another, besides that people should be fully aware how the current system works in law.

Social Security’s “trust fund” is an empty pit of debt obligations. Benefits to current recipients are paid with incoming payroll taxes. Any difference is made up with additional taxes or monetary inflation, by way of Treasury bonds. They “reinvest it in the economy” if there’s ever a surplus, e.g., through military contractors. It finances the national debt.

Putting aside the quirks of that setup, the basic function is that the taxes you pay in now are not an investment in your own future, you’re basically just paying for the retirement of older people now. The expectation is that someone down the road will then pay taxes to finance your retirement. Hence, how SS was able to start paying benefits almost immediately (3 years) after payroll taxes started being collected.

What is your prediction for what will become of it, though. GDP growth stops and people start bursting into flames? You know we’ve actually observed this before, right?

Now, if you do mean “capitalism” not in the plain definition of “an economy based around private ownership”, but the more specific version where control of capital is highly centralized - there’s some truth to the idea that economic decline can cause people to start looking to reform that system. True of any system, really, because people generally don’t want to see their quality of life decrease. But that’s very different than an economic system “requiring” it to function.

Capitalism does not “collapse” with 0 or negative GDP growth. I don’t know where people got this idea. You only really see any sort of “collapse” if the social structure breaks down - the basic behaviors of trading continue even in extreme crises, insofar as a society operates with property assigned to individuals like that. Not counting “bubbles” and such as a “collapse”.

Unfortunately our own pensions and such are also getting wiped out by the same forces. And with less access to insider information.

Increase the number of participants in an economy, increases both supply and demand for labor, long story short. “Immigrants taking our jobs” is the stupidest talking point in human history.

Both.

There’s no such thing as any cleanly delineated race or ethnicity, save for maybe some people who’ve been isolated on an island for a thousand years. But it is a natural response to the weaponized term “antisemitism” being used against defenders of Palestinians, to point out that both groups are described as “semitic”.

I only see one country bragging about influencing U.S. election outcomes, and it’s not Russia. You guys constructed Pepe Silvia-level theories about Russian influence and ignored the domestic corporatocracy and entire U.S. empire in favor of the media’s chosen explanation of “Russian influence”. As the saying more or less goes, nobody is immune to propaganda, including you. Modern propaganda narratives include accusations of propaganda leveled at the propaganda narrative’s scapegoats.

Right, so up until the point the USDA PLC programs get exhausted (afaict ~$25B/yr), they compensate for the difference between the price floor (not sure if we’re above or below that now) and market price. But that’s a subsidy to the farmers, not an effect on the market price - the expense comes to taxpayers. And sometimes, they scoop up surplus through CCC, then remarket it elsewhere, an indirect/artificial market mechanism, which can include exports.

If that’s what you were saying re: USAID cancellation eventually raising food prices, you have quite a few leaps of logic in there.

No, I’m still not really sure what you’re trying to say. Your original post was about the price to consumers.

And as for the relationship between farmers and distributors, that really depends on the specifics of the purchasing agreements they enter into.

It depends on the market. If producing less food with the same resources costs more, prices will rise–especially on large commercial farms, which dominate the U.S. agricultural sector.

The part you quoted from what I said was in reference to an agricultural buyer being lost. There are other reasons to anticipate the costs of inputs increasing, but I’m going through analyzing factor by factor (descending analysis) and all of a sudden we’re jumping back up to the top to talk about something else.

Re: grocery chains (not USAID) and futures contracts - not sure how this ties in either, we’re talking about USAID, which AFAIK does procurement through a bidding process for direct purchases, not via futures.

I’m not sure what your main point is here. I was responding to you grouping together a labor shortage and a demand shock as - from what it sounded like - a reason to expect high prices. But demand shocks lower prices on the consumer side of food production, as opposed to raising them, because the food at that point exists, and whoever has it needs to sell it, more desperately than they were before.

True, well, I mean, take the effects I described and apply them to the respective agricultural sectors. We will very likely see price increases in fresh produce and some price decrease in corn, soy, wheat, dairy, etc. (I say “some” because the actual global demand for food hasn’t decreased, rather, the purchasing power has been decreased because some subsidization has been lost due to USAID absence).

Reminder, losing a large purchasing segment decreases demand, which lowers prices until the market adjusts. I.e., it frees up agricultural output that they have to sell, which they’ll lower prices to make sell to other buyers (domestically or internationally).

Obligatory downvote for turncoat AOC. Two party narrative reinforcement in full effect.

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Yeah, maybe it’s that, or maybe it’s that the arms trade is profitable.

There is no solution for a population voting incorrectly than for them to correct their behavior. You have no point.