Roofable

Cash Crop: It Ain’t Pineapples

[Hojin Chang guest authors a post this week, he is a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker who specializes in Southwest Orlando (Dr. Phillips, Windermere, Gotha, Celebration, Winter Garden, Ocoee, Clermont and Hunters Creek) and writes a blog at sworlandoblog.com. ]

With the state of the current real estate market its becoming harder to find places to invest in real estate that will not be falling in value for the next few years. Perhaps a farm that receives subsidies is a great real estate investment. Farm subsidies that were originally designed to keep farmer afloat during the Great Depression is now a 16 billion dollar a year program being abused by the wealthiest who are farmers in name only.

Paul Allen, co founder of Microsoft, Ted Turner, and the Prince of Lichtenstein are among the recipients of this subsidy. They’re not farmers by any means, they just own land that used to be farms and qualifies for this subsidy. As long as the land you own is designated to receive the subsidy, the government pays even if the land is no longer a farm. Heck they keep paying even when you’re dead.

Another way to abuse this subsidy is that big farmers can subdivide the farm into as many separate entities to get more subsidies. There are cases where a single farm is subdivided into 60 farms to get 60x’s the subsidy and its perfectly legal as long as you legal subdivide the farm.

All of this is being paid by our tax dollars. I don’t see an end to this scam any time soon because the politicians in the Midwest will never get reelected if they even mention anything about reforming this program.

I guess the only thing you can do is buy a farm that qualifies for this program.

Learn more about subsidies for the rich:CNBC video link.