President Donald Trump is contemplating an economic relief package to farmers that could equal as much as $17.3 billion — and experts are calling him out for his so-called “welfare.”
“Yet again Trump's moronic policies screwed over farmers and now he wants to take our money and give it to them as welfare,” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller posted on X on Wednesday. “Maybe Trump should pay them himself out of his crypto company instead.”
The “welfare” in question is an economic aid bill supported by Republican lawmakers to provide assistance to farmers struggling in the current economy. The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), through its president Zippy Duvall, described it in a statement as a move in the right direction toward helping the agricultural community. The AFBF said any relief package should prioritize "economic aid to help farmers struggling with historic inflation, protecting interstate commerce from a patchwork of state laws and approving the sale of E15 blended fuel year-round."
Speaking with AlterNet, economist Ed Gresser — Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at the Progressive Policy Institute — agreed with Miller’s statement that Trump’s tariffs have been bad for farmers, but pushed back on the characterization of potential financial support as “welfare.”
“Tariffs have been quite bad for farmers in two ways,” Gresser explained. “One is that they have led to reactions against American products overseas, sometimes by governments and sometimes by public opinion. In a typical year, American agriculture exports about $180 billion worth of stuff that typically makes up about one-fifth of US farm income. So it's quite a lot: half the exports go to, or at least historically went to, China, Canada, and Mexico.”
Yet Trump’s tariffs have hurt American farmers in all three of those markets, Gresser added.
“The exports to China have shriveled up because the Chinese retaliated very hard and hit back again directly against American farmers,” Gresser said. “Mexico has kind of held up. Canada is off, not so much because the government of Canada has taken any particular steps but because Canadians have looked for American goods so as not to buy them.”
“The tariff program has badly screwed over American farmers,” Gresser added, while also pointing out that "farmers are definitely in trouble."
"I mean, they've lost a lot of income. There's been a big increase in farm bankruptcies. The idea that the US government would respond to that in the abstract is not a terrible one in my opinion.”
Democratic strategist Max Burns pointed out that same month that “the suicide rate in rural communities is now 3.5 times the national average and climbing ... [as] farmers buckle under the financial strain of crippling agricultural tariffs, rising input costs and a president who didn’t bother to mention them once in his most recent State of the Union address."
However regular taxpayers take it, Trump’s relief to farmers will shore up his support among that constituency. An Economist/YouGov poll in April found overwhelming majorities of American farmers continue to support Trump staunchly, even though many also connect their current struggles to his tariffs.
“Twenty-seven percent of rural respondents said it would be ‘impossible’ to cover an unexpected $1,000 bill. It would be easy to blame Mr Trump for the downturn,” The Economist explained. “After all, he campaigned on promises to bring down prices and revive the heartland. But rural America does not.”