Democrats Can Finally Stop Pandering to Farmers

New York Times

21 hours ago

Here's some bad news: The 'big, beautiful bill' that President Trump signed into law on July 4 accelerates the egregious bipartisan tradition of showering taxpayer dollars on well-off farmers. It is projected to pour more than $90 billion into new agricultural subsidies and tax credits for farm-grown fuels like corn ethanol, while making it easier for the biggest farmers to vacuum up cash and the least sustainable biofuels to qualify for credits.
It gets worse: The congressional Republicans who passed the bill without Democratic votes also ended the tradition of pairing the lavish handouts known as the 'farm safety net' with an actual food safety net for the poor. The bill slashes nearly $200 billion from the federal food stamp program known as SNAP, making life harder for millions of vulnerable families.
But here's a potential silver lining: The G.O.P.'s decision to sever the half-century-old pairing of farm handouts with food assistance offers Democratic politicians an opportunity to stop supporting environmentally and fiscally ludicrous subsidies for farmers who wouldn't dream of voting for Democrats. Instead, they could start pushing sensible policies focused on eaters instead of growers. It's time someone in Washington did.
For decades, U.S. farm policy has been a bipartisan festival of ag-lobby pandering, shoveling enormous piles of cash to farmers through grants, heavily subsidized loans, even more heavily subsidized insurance, disaster aid and an alphabet soup of other thinly disguised welfare programs. Large farms that grow the most common row crops get the largest subsidies, with extra incentives for corn and soybean growers to produce supposedly eco-friendly biofuels that actually threaten forests and the climate.
Republican support for this kind of agricultural socialism is philosophically hypocritical but politically understandable, as rural America has trended overwhelmingly Republican. In the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, the G.O.P. provided more goodies than ever for its loyal base of multimillionaires in John Deere caps, relaxing payment and income limits for the wealthiest farmers, creating new insurance subsidies for big poultry producers and demanding absurdly lenient sustainability analyses of crop-based aviation fuels.
In the past, even as their brand became poisonous in rural America, many Democrats pandered to big farmers just as relentlessly as Republicans, supporting most of the same subsidies while echoing the same clichés about 'heartland values.' Urban Democrats who might have otherwise fought farm bills reliably supported them as long as the bills funded food stamps.
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