Trump Tries to Win Over Midwest Farmers with Socialist Promises
Last Friday, Donald Trump proposed a massive $15 billion bail out for American farmers. That sum is supposed to bring relief from the trade war with China that the president started by imposing tariffs on Chinese goods which prompted the Chinese government to retaliate with its own tariffs strategically targeting Trump's base.
That's a hefty amount of money from an administration that's proposed making catastrophic cuts to welfare programs in the past. In a tweet, Trump claimed that the U.S. should take that $15 billion from "the over 100 Billion Dollars in Tariffs that we take in" from tariffs that he says China is already paying. Specifically, Trump wants to use that money to buy "15 Billion Dollars of Agriculture from our Farmers."
Even if we accept all of Trump's numbers as accurate, and there's no reason to believe anything that Trump tweets is, it's not China that's paying the tariffs in the long run, it's American consumers. A tariff is a tax on goods imported into the U.S., and companies faced with that tax are just going to pass the cost on to the Americans who buy their goods. That $15 billion could certainly ease some of the strain that farmers are feeling as the slump in Chinese demand is causing the price of crops to drop, but a similar $12 billion relief package last year did little to take the pressure off of them. As the Des Moines Register reports, midwestern farmers in particular are getting hit hard as prices for corn and soybeans are plummeting. And they don't see things getting better:
"It's a physical and mental challenge," said Renner, a 43-year-old who farms near Klemme, a town of about 500 people west of Clear Lake[, Iowa]. "A lot of us think it can't get any worse, that it can only go up from here. But that's probably not a safe bet," he said.
More to the point, Trump and congressional Republicans have been crowing about socialism for a long time now. Trump devoted part of his State of the Union address this year to it. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said the GOP was the "firewall that saves the country from socialism," and Republican senators in Georgia and Colorado are running on "Democrats are socialists" campaigns. House Republicans are even trying to make an "Anti-Socialist" caucus. Now, they're largely railing against relatively meager progressive reforms, like Elizabeth Warren's plan for nationwide child care, things that aren't actually socialist. But now, Trump is calling for the U.S. government to purchase billions of dollars worth of products produced by American farmers, which is much closer to the centralized state planning that Republicans hate whenever it doesn't benefit them or people they hope will vote for them.
Trump isn't being hypocritical here; in fact, this is him being remarkably consistent. His real-estate empire largely exists because of his success at milking political connections to get state and city governments to throw money at him—cutting his taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars and in cases even fronting him the money for construction costs. The main difference between this kind of state intervention and the "socialism" that Trump and other Republicans rail against is who it benefits. Government subsidies for wealthy real estate moguls like Trump are fine, as are bail outs, like the proposed $15 billion for farmers, that in the long run can help keep Republicans in office. But pushes for the government to do more to help people who aren't billionaires and millionaires—like wiping out student debt or making insulin affordable—that's when Trump and conservatives declare that no one should rely on the government for handouts.
DMT.NEWS
via DMT.NEWS Luke Darby, Khareem Sudlow
