I’ll give you an election enhancing money grab
Trump rails against the student loan forgiveness plan:
“Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats have just orchestrated another election enhancing money grab, this time to the tune of $300,000,000,000 — and just like I predicted, it’s coming right out of the pocket of the working-class Americans who are struggling the most!” Trump said Thursday in a statement.
Blah,blah, blah. The GOP is out there blathering about how the Democratic Party is the party of rich white people. Lol. His signature tax cuts didn’t exactly go to poor people of color. And it was worth trillions. (And Trump complaining about money grabs is something else.)
Remember this from 2020? Please….
Government payments to farmers have surged to historic levels under President Donald Trump as the Agriculture Department floods the industry with cash to stem the financial losses from Trump’s tariff fights and the coronavirus pandemic.
But as agriculture grows more reliant on unprecedented taxpayer support, farm policy experts and watchdog groups warn the subsidies are growing too big and too fast, with no strings attached and little oversight from Congress — and that Washington could have a difficult time shutting off the spigot.
Direct farm aid has climbed each year of Trump’s presidency, from $11.5 billion in 2017 to more than $32 billion this year — an all-time high, with potentially far more funding still to come in 2020, amounting to about two-thirds of the cost of the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development and more than the Agriculture Department’s $24 billion discretionary budget, according to a POLITICO analysis. But lawmakers have taken a largely hands-off approach, letting the department decide who gets the money and how much.
The massive payments have been a political boon to Trump in farm country — he tweeted in January that he hoped the money would be “the thing they will most remember” — but risk creating a culture of dependency, as farmers and ranchers work the bonus subsidies into their financial plans when making large, up-front investments in seed, feed and farm machinery.
“It’s a big problem for agriculture because it’s not sustainable,” said Anne Schechinger, senior economics analyst at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit watchdog organization. “It’s really difficult once you’re giving farmers this much money to then take away those [payments].”
It’s a problem for taxpayers, too: The size, speed and lack of scrutiny of the payments should concern the public,says Neil Hamilton, emeritus professor and former director of Drake University’s Agricultural Law Center.
“It’s just, ‘Here’s your check.’ There’s an incredible amount of trust that [farmers] will use it wisely,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it’s your and my tax money. It’s not a crazy idea to ask what the public’s getting from this, or could the public expect more for it.”
The spending surge began in mid-2018 when USDA started writing checks to farmers and ranchers to pay for the damage from Trump’s trade war, which brought about higher tariffs that crushed agricultural exports and commodity prices. Farm sales to China plummeted from $19.5 billion in 2017 to just $9 billion the next year; as producers continued to hemorrhage profits in 2019, farm bankruptcies jumped nearly 20 percent last year.
The trade bailout has now spanned three years and surpassed $23 billion, even though it was never appropriated by Congress. Instead, the money was funneled through USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation, a Depression-era agency that can borrow from the U.S. Treasury to stabilize the farm economy.
That bailout was entirely due to Trump’s fatuous “trade war” and he openly touted it as away to buy votes in rural America. Many of those “farmers” are very wealthy members of Big Ag.
By the way, apropos of nothing:
The U.S. Department of Education reports that roughly 2.4 million Americans ages 62 and older carry an average of $40,750 in college debt.
I would guess most of them are people who went back to school later in life and took jobs in public service for job security and benefits. They are also drowning in debt.