[aamar]

I'm very sympathetic to your overall stance on this and greatly appreciate that you named a specific type of spending to cut: corn subsidies.

That said, I'd be grateful for backup/citations that corn subsidies are bad for the U.S. in economic terms. Two common complaints about corn subsidies -- that the U.S. is cheating on NAFTA, or that overconsumption of corn products lead to health problems -- seem legitimate, but they don't seem to have inflicted any economic damage to the U.S. Further, although there's both redistribution and waste associated with the tax revenues that pay for the subsidies, corn is an infrastructural element of U.S. food production, and presumably corn's cheapness and relative consistency of supply lead to many multiples of downstream ROI.

I do, by the way, think economic harm is the right standard here, as it seems to be the main consideration in Carmack's essay. (Carmack and many commenters here do make reference to more abstract ideas of fairness and legitimacy, but that analysis seems irretrievably subjective and unproductive.)