Trump's Big CON: He is a Jackass, The Farmers Edition

"Rick Hammond said he wasn’t worried. In more than 30 years of working his wife’s fifth-generation farm in York County, Neb., and steadily acquiring more acres to leave to their kids, he had seen it all: the high inflation and rapid land devaluation of 1980s, the consolidation of farms that followed those bankruptcies, the steady depopulation of rural populations ever since. But he wasn’t worried about a repeat of history. Despite falling grain prices, stalled land values and mounting farm debt, his family was more than equipped to weather a bad year. 'Now, if we see sub-four-dollar corn for two more years,' Hammond continued, 'yeah, you’ll see some people going broke.'

That was the fall of 2014. Today, corn prices remain perilously low. At just $3.50 per bushel, it now costs more to grow corn than a farmer can sell it for. Soybeans, which surged in planted acres when corn prices went into free fall, are only marginally better. Now below $10 per bushel, beans are trading at less than two-thirds of their price of just a few years ago. To get through these lean times, farmers have been taking out more and more loans. U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics indicate that while farm income has been cut nearly in half in the past four years, farm debt has increased by more than a quarter — with projections that it could surpass $390 billion in 2017, the highest level since the farm crisis in the 1980s.

And yet, President Trump — whom many farmers voted for specifically because of plunging income — may be about to make things far worse.

With those unsustainable debts and dwindling profit margins in mind, more than 75 percent of rural voters in the Farm Belt cast their ballots for Trump in the last presidential election. They cheered Trump’s promise to support the Renewable Fuel Standard (which props up the ethanol industry), his pledge to eliminate estate taxes on inherited farmland and roll back regulations on farm runoff, and, most of all, they liked his tough talk on trade policy. Roughly one-third of their combined corn and soybean harvest is shipped overseas, so farmers said they were heartened by Trump’s reputation as a hard-nosed negotiator, a businessman renowned for his skill at the art of the deal, who could strong-arm trading partners into paying higher prices for American commodity grains. Instead, Trump is threatening to withdraw entirely from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — a move that farm lobbying organizations, market analysts and trade experts universally agree would be disastrous for farmers."

Read the Washington Post, Farmers voted heavily for Trump. But his trade policies are terrible for them.