[Liberals caught lying...] Farmers Got Billions From Taxpayers In 2019, And Hardly Anyone Objected

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/farmers-got-
billions-from-taxpayers-in-2019-and-hardly-anyone-objected

In 2019, the federal government delivered an extraordinary financial aid
package to America's farmers. Farm subsidies jumped to their highest level
in fourteen years, most of them paid out without any action by Congress.

The money flowed to farms like Robert Henry's. When I visited in early
July, many of his fields near New Madrid, Mo., had been flooded for
months, preventing him from working in them. The soybeans that he did
manage to grow had fallen in value; China wasn't buying them, in
retaliation for the Trump administration's tariffs.

That's when the government stepped in. Some of the aid came from long-
familiar programs. Government-subsidized crop insurance covered some of
the losses from flooding. Other payments were unprecedented. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture simply sent him a check to compensate him for
the low prices resulting from the trade war.

"'Trump money' is what we call it," Henry said. "It helped a lot. And it's
my understanding, they're going to do it again."

Indeed, a few weeks later, the USDA announced another $16 billion in
trade-related aid to farmers. It came on top of the previous year's $12
billion package, for a grand total of $28 billion in two years. About $19
billion of that money had been paid out by the end of 2019, and the rest
will be paid in 2020.



"President Trump has great affection for America's farmers and ranchers.
He knows that they're fighting the fight and that they're on the front
lines," Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue told reporters while
announcing the aid package.

The announcement aroused little controversy. "I was surprised that it
didn't attract more attention," says Joe Glauber, the USDA's former chief
economist, who's now a senior research fellow at the International Food
Policy Research Institute.

Glauber says it deserves more attention, for a whole collection of
reasons.

For one thing, it's an enormous amount of money, more than the final cost
of bailing out the auto industry during the financial crisis of 2008. The
auto industry bailout was fiercely debated in Congress. Yet the USDA
created this new program out of thin air; it decided that an old law
authorizing a USDA program called the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC)
already gave it the authority to spend this money.

"What's unique about this is, [it] didn't go through Congress," Glauber
says. Some people have raised questions about whether using the CCC for
this new purpose is legal.

Glauber sees a risk of "moral hazard" — a situation in which someone is
shielded from the consequences of poor decisions. The decision to start
the trade war was costly, he says, and the Trump Administration, by
tapping the federal treasury, is avoiding the political fallout from that
decision. "The sector that is hurt the most, and which would normally
complain, all of a sudden it's assuaged by these payments. To me, that's a
problem," he says.

Also, the payments are quite generous. According to studies by several
independent economists, the USDA is paying farmers roughly twice as much
as the actual harm that they suffered from the trade war. And the payments
are based on production; the bigger the farm, the bigger the payments.
Thousands of farmers got more than $100,000 each. According to an NPR
analysis of USDA records of payments made through July 2019, 100,000
individuals collected just over 70 percent of the money.

Catherine Kling, an economist at Cornell University, says the government
could at least have demanded some public benefits in exchange for that
money. "I think it's a real lost opportunity," she says.

What farmers do with their land has a huge impact on water quality,
wildlife and climate change, Kling says. The USDA has programs that pay
farmers to help the environment, doing things like restoring wetlands.

The budget for those environmental programs is just a quarter of the size
of this year's trade-related payments. So Kling's reaction to this year's
farm bailout is, "Wow, [there are] so many things that money could get
spent on that could really be beneficial to taxpayers, who are ultimately
footing the bill."

On Capitol Hill, there has long been a quiet alliance between lawmakers
who support farm subsidies and those who support food stamps, or SNAP.
Together, they've supported the budget of the USDA, which runs both
programs.

Events in 2019 tested that alliance, as the USDA helped farmers while
restricting SNAP payments.

"They've already given out $19 billion to farmers, but they're cutting $5
billion from people in need!" says Congresswoman Marcia Fudge (D-OH), who
sits on the House Agriculture Committee. "I don't even know how to
describe it except to say that it is cruel, it is unfair, and it is
clearly designed to support the president's base, as he sees it, as
opposed to those whom he sees as being undeserving."

The USDA has not yet announced whether it will deliver another round of
trade-related payments to farmers in 2020.



--
No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.

Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party ran out of gas and got run over by a Trump
truck.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
of the Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.

Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump has boosted the economy, reduced illegal immigration,
appointed dozens of judges and created jobs.