Open letter to the President

To: President Obama

CC.All the other Presidents around the globe

Respect Mr. Obama,
Hearing of your election was a high point in my life. Congratulations to us all. I'll get to the point because I know you (or more likely, one of your aides or employees) has a busy schedule.

With unemployment so high, we can create as many permanent jobs as we want by subsidizing and/or waiving property and income taxes on organic farms. The point of this is to provid a service (healthy jobs, healthy food) to us all, a service worth much more than the miniscule amount of tax revenue the farms give to the country, but the money saved would be much greater. Better food equals less sickness. More jobs means less people need unemployment checks.

I'm only 23 years old, so I remember what school lunches are like these days. It is garbage! It's as bad as fast food, or worse. Eating organic makes me feel better overall, than non-organic. No wonder our students rank far behind the rest of the developed world. How can they learn when they have no energy to even stay awake in class? I speak of that from experience. “Conventional” agriculture does not provide the necessary vitamins and minerals, is hard to digest and has additives and pesticides that strain the body for having to get rid of them.

Organic farms would provide us with enough food to keep our students and citizens healthy and happy doing meaningful work. These types of farms have extremely low overhead costs, the main cost is buying the land and paying taxes, which is where you come in, Mr. President.

Start-up costs are not the same for organic farms if they manpower instead of horsepower (tractor power). Large tractors aren't necessary, in fact they steal jobs from people who can easily do the work the tractor does. The point is to cure unemployment, so why buy tractors when you can hire 20 people for the same price? Giving good land at a fair price with no taxes is the best thing you and the government can do, and the rest will be done by the people themselves, just going out and living this life. Government and private charities who help the homeless spend enough money each year to buy enough farms to get those people off the street, permanently. They can build their own houses and grow their own food if only they are given land, land which we have plenty of. The government already subsidizes agriculture in a huge way, with little benefit to the people. Subsidized factory farms churn out corn to make animal feed and corn syrup, and soybeans to make who knows what, and it's all done with tractors.

This program could wipe out the street problem completely. Homelessness is basically caused by unemployment and solving one will solve the other. We are rich enough in natural resources, internal and external, to do it. Remember Thomas Jefferson's idea of how life would be better if more people were “gentlemen farmers.”

National forests are commonly used for mining and timber, so why not use it for organic farming too? Farms harm the land much less than either of those. The government already owns the land, so that's a plus.

I'm not saying farming is the best life for everyone or that we should abandon the great benefits technology and civilization has brought to us, but it should be an option for anyone who wants to do it.