Like some character in “Alice in Wonderland,” we’re well beyond the looking glass when the presumptive presidential candidate of the political party that prides itself as being fiscally conservative asks farmers, “Look, did I get you $28 billion … ?”
Yes, that was Donald Trump on the stump in Iowa a week before smashing his Republican opponents in the state’s presidential caucuses Jan. 15.
And, no, he didn’t stop with that question, according to the Politico report filed after the Sioux Center gathering where the former president spoke. “Who the hell else would get you $28 billion from China?” he asked.
Well, Politico suggested, at least two others.
The first was the actual source of the billions in trade aid: “The $28 billion Trump mentioned didn’t actually come from China, however. It was paid out by the US government to compensate farmers harmed by Trump’s trade war with Beijing.”
And, “As for his question… the [second] answer is: the Biden administration.”
In fact, the story continued, “… over the first three years of their presidencies, Biden and Trump’s payments to farmers are virtually identical [as] … both men authorized nearly $57 billion in direct federal payments to farmers over that time span.”
Wow. That’s $114 billion in farm program aid between the two of them in just six years, or a whopping $19 billion a year. Explain this to me again: Why is this something to brag about?
While fourth-year ag spending by the Biden White House has yet to occur, it will have to be huge to beat the Trump Administration’s fourth year total of $52 billion, the largest one-year amount since USDA began “recording farm payment data in 1933.”
Most of the spending for Trump’s final year and Joe Biden’s first two years was tied to the trillions in COVID-19 aid passed by Congress to keep the US economy afloat while markets, swamped by the deadly pandemic, searched for solid ground.
Even though Trump’s question about how he delivered billions in aid to farmers and ranchers was wildly inaccurate, it wasn’t without effect. On Jan. 15, he destroyed his two closest Iowa opponents by a decisive 30 percentage points.
While votes might be the ultimate measure of political success, they are not an accurate measure of farm policy success. Net farm income–the collective national farm income after expenses–serves that purpose far better.
By that widely accepted yardstick, the Biden Administration is outperforming the Trump White House, noted Politico: “… Biden has been better for farmers than Trump: Net farm income has actually gone up since the Democrat entered the White House.”
And not just up, but way up. “On average, net farm income has totaled $165 billion between 2021 and 2023,” during the first three Biden years “compared to $94 billion between 2017 and 2019” of the Trump White House years.
Moreover, “Farm income reached a record high of nearly $189 billion in 2022.”
Despite that glowing, three-year record of net farm income–while all but matching Trump’s $57 billion in disaster assistance during that period–most political handicappers rate Biden’s 2024 reelection chances among farmers, ranchers, and other rural voters somewhere between dismal and abysmal.
That worries Joe Glauber, USDA’s chief economist during the Obama years, because of Trump’s export tariff record–especially with China, the cause of the $28 billion in taxpayer-funded disaster payments the former president touted in Iowa.
“(S)hould Trump be reelected,” Glauber told Politico, “the former president’s plan to aggressively expand tariffs risks triggering another trade war that would ‘really hurt US agriculture.’”
Of course, none of this really matters if today’s national candidates adopt the slogan “Elect me because I’ll send you more federal money than the other guy” when campaigning in rural America.
Alan Guebert is an agricultural journalist who was raised on an Illinois dairy farm and worked as a writer and senior editor at Professional Farmers of America and Successful Farming magazine and is now a contributing editor to Farm Journal magazine. Guebert and his daughter Mary Grace Foxwell co-wrote “The Land of Milk and Uncle Honey: Memories from the Farm of My Youth” [University of Illinois Press, 2015]. See past columns, supporting documents, and contact information at farmandfoodfile.com
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2024
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