Trump promises farmers another $16B bribe to ignore the fact that he's destroying their lives
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Donald Trump is handing out another $16 billion to farmers who are “winning” because of his trade war with China. It’s a handsome bribe—well over the cost of a brand-new aircraft carrier—but unfortunately for family farmers who are going bankrupt aTrump promises farmers another $16B bribe to ignore the fact that he's destroying their lives
Donald Trump is handing out another $16 billion to farmers who are “winning” because of his trade war with China. It’s a handsome bribe—well over the cost of a brand-new aircraft carrier—but unfortunately for family farmers who are going bankrupt at a rate not seen since the farm crisis of the 1980s, it doesn’t begin to address the issues they are facing. As The New York Times reports, global markets are starting to factor in Trump’s tariffs and trade wars as if they are a fixed item. After all, there’s been no sign that Trump is making any progress toward actually reaching a trade agreement, and his self-vaunted skills at brinkmanship are only opening a wider and wider gulf, with larger and larger tariffs. The results of Trump’s trade war are also depressing commodity prices, including commodities such as oil, with the price of American crude down by 5%. Trump’s trade war is weighing down the whole world’s economy in a way that affects stocks, affects growth, and affects the value that average people see in their retirement funds. But no one is being hit from as many angles as farmers. Trump’s tariffs directly and abruptly struck farmers by costing them billions in deals that would have happened before he brought down the door. Importers in China, and not just in China, moved to make deals with farmers in Europe, South America, and Africa who had been looking for just this sort of opportunity to cut into the United States’ dominance in this market. And in the wake of those deals, there was the inevitable secondary effect as prices for U.S. agricultural commodities took a sharp drop. Farmers were left with burgeoning inventories of goods they were trying to push into a declining market at prices well below cost. Then came round 2. In the hope that Trump might soon reach accommodation and prices would rebound, thousands of farmers decided not to sell grain at a loss. Instead they stored record amounts, filling silos and storage bins across the farm states. But the dispute over tariffs Trump began last spring wasn’t settled in the summer, or the fall, or the winter. While Trump continued to expand the scope of his trade war, genuinely massive amounts of food waited for some chance to be sold. Read more