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Iowa

In reply to the discussion: Grassley's grift [View all]

progressoid

(51,750 posts)
7. I was recently revisiting the Orange Menace's 28 Billion dollar give away to farmers
Mon Jun 20, 2022, 10:21 PM
Jun 2022

Still pisses me off. All those pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, fiscal conservative republican farmers didn't bat an eye cashing those checks.

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 14 years, most of them paid out without any action by Congress.

The money flowed to farmers like Robert Henry. 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."

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



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