system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What are farm subsidies and how do they work?
gpt
Okay, so for years the United States produced more cotton than any other country. So anyone in other countries who wanted cotton would end importing it from the United States.

All was well, and the cotton farmers had a great time, since everyone was paying top dollar for their cotton.

Now, for a number of reasons that I'll explain when you're older, other countries suddenly were able to grow and sell cotton for cheaper than the United States. This was very bad news for American cotton farmers, who couldn't compete with the cheap cotton coming from other countries.

So, the cotton farmers said Help! Please, government, can you do something? Our business is in danger, and as you can see, the United States relies on all the business the cotton trade brings in! Please do something! 

So, the government says "Well, you're right, this cotton industry is too big to fail. What we'll do is we'll pay you some money each year so that you can lower the prices of your cotton." This way, people don't start buying Brazilian or Egyptian cotton, the US cotton is cheaper for them.

This is sorta short-sighted though. The government is propping up a business that can't keep itself afloat, and everyone who pays taxes ends up paying a bit of their money each paycheck so that US cotton is cheaper than imported cotton. 

Now this has happened in other industries as well. Wheat, corn, oil, and a bunch of other things are all heavily subsidized, so that your bread and gasoline are cheaper and so that you don't have to buy imported goods, keeping the money inside the country, and creating jobs for Americans. This is of course silly and unsustainable.

This causes other weird stuff like for instance if one year everyone grows too many pigs, the price of pork will drop too low, so sometimes the government will come in and pay the farmers to kill their pigs and bury them, so that they don't suddenly flood the market with cheap pork, putting some people out of business.

Now, it gets even weirder. Since sugar is so hard to produce in America, and it's so easy to grow in the tropics, instead of subsidizing American sugar, we put tariffs on imported sugar. That means, there's an extra tax on sugar that you get from other countries. That combined with the fact that corn is subsidized by the government means that people who make sweet foods have switched away from using real sugar, and instead use high fructose corn syrup. All kinds of weird things like that happen when the government artificially interferes with the prices of goods.

Now, to make things *even* weirder, back to the example of cotton.. All of the sudden Brazil, who we trade with a lot, says "Hey, you guys are subsidizing your cotton so it's too cheap, so we are unable to sell our Brazilian cotton. Do something about that or we won't trade coffee (for example) with you!"

The sane thing to do might be to lower the subsidies given to US farmers, but those are written into contracts that couldn't be broken at the time, so what they did instead is subsidize Brazilian farmers! That's right, the some of the tax dollars that US citizens pay off of every check goes to Brazilian cotton farmers so that they can lower the prices of their cotton, so they can compete with the unfairly low prices of US cotton! Imagine that!