President Donald J. Trump applauds the crowd prior to delivering remarks in support of the Farmers to Families Food Box distribution program Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, at Flavor First Growers and Packers in Mills River, N.C. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Author Jill Lawrence tells Bulwark that Trump’s hurtful economic policies are uniting people across the financial spectrum.
John Bartman and documentary filmmaker Abigail Disney each speak of money in two very different lives — and Trump has done damage to both.
Bartman is a small-town Illinois corn and soybean farmer, fifth generation, and the star of a new Democratic National Committee video about the risks of farming in the storm of Trump’s back-and-forth tariffs policies. Last month, Bartman needed a new wiring harness for his combine. Anybody who’s ever had to replace the wire harness of their car can speak to the cost of that, but because of Trump’s damaging tariff schemes that particular part was only available in one place on the U.S. mainland.
“Farmers are driving all over the country right now to get parts” Bartman said. “The manufacturers don’t know what to do because the tariffs change every week.”
Disney, meanwhile, is a New York philanthropist who recently told journalists that the top federal estate tax rate when her grandfather died in 1971 was 77 percent, and the exempted amount before any tax kicked in was $60,000. When her grandmother died later in 1984, the maximum rate was 55 percent and the exemption was $325,000. But when her father died in 2009, the top rate was 45 percent and the exemption was $3.5 million.
Trump told his friends at Mar-a-Lago in 2017 that “You all just got a lot richer,” when he signed the GOP tax law that doubled the estate tax exemption from $5.49 million to $11.18 million. That figure is now $13.99 million, and Disney is now a member of Patriotic Millionaires, a group that wants the government to raise taxes on wealthy people like them before the nation’s budget defaults.
“I was left more money than I could ever possibly use,” she said, adding that she has given away roughly 75 percent of what she inherited.
Disney said at a World Bank panel last week that extreme wealth destroys empathy: “There is such a thing as too much money. It’s bad for the world for sure, but it’s also bad for the people who own it.”
While Disney frets over increasingly psychopathic wealthy people holding “the keys to Democracy” Bartman says Trump’s “stupid governmental policy” is costing people sleep and jobs, and not only in farm communities.
“Trump spent $28 billion to bail out farmers in his first-term trade war with China. Under Trump’s renewed tariff chaos, to the fury of Bartman and many others, China is now buying Argentine and Brazilian soybeans, and Trump is floating another bailout,” Lawrence tells Bulwark.
“A bailout is like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound,” said Bartman. “Government bailouts do not make up for our loss of income. We don’t want a bailout. We want markets for our crops.”
“What the heiress and the farmer share is the quaint idea of evidence-based, common-sense policies, and investments that, like highways and schools, create paths to success for as many people as possible,” Lawrence wrote. “… That does not seem like too much to ask from the leaders of a (for now) global superpower. But all indications are that Trump and his wealthy allies care far less about the nation’s future than their own literal fortunes.”
Read the Bulwark report at this link.
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