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America's cities are hurting. Once booming towns like Detroit, producing cars, and Pittsburgh, producing steel, are all hurting.

The global economy today means that you cannot just get a high school diploma and end up making a high 5-figure salary in a union job…at least you cannot do this in a city; the countryside is a different story.

While our nation's cities have to “get with the economic times,” our biggest and richest farmers never have to. While we cut programs in the cities, we expand aid to farmers to $37.3 billion over 8 years. Who has to pay? All of us, including the urban workers, who now earn less than ever.

These are not poor family farmers; they are big corporate farms. To add insult to injury, the way that we pay the farmers means that they get benefits not just when the crop is too small (due to bad weather). It is not enough to get help when you are on bad times. Instead, these big corporate farmers also get help in the good times, through the so-called loan deficiency payments, when they produce more crops than the market wants.

So what about the environment and reducing our dependence on foreign oil? No help there. It turns out that producing ethanol fuel from corn is not worth the energy. You need oil to get the ethanol produced.

With our deficit spending cuts, we should make sure that the necessary pain is not unfairly born just in the cities; corporate welfare in the big farms has to take a hit too. Otherwise, I have another suggestion:

Detroit should act like our farmers, switch to corn to get the free money. I invite the big corporate farms to my home town, Detroit, so that we can cash in on the program too.