Big win for the farmers

How do work requirements for food stamp eligibility benefit farmers?

And speaking of wins for farmers...

[I]n southern Minnesota, where generations of soybean farmers and pork producers are already used to economic uncertainty, Trump's tough talk on trade has been demoralizing.

The same tariffs that Trump touted on Wednesday have left these growers as collateral damage in an escalating fight with China. Tariffs beget tariffs in the fight, and the Chinese have targeted both American staples, pushing down commodity prices and sinking farm values.

[...]

While summer is the growing season for soybeans, farmers will begin harvesting in September and October, weeks before midterm elections that will surely be seen as a political referendum on the President.

"This isn't just numbers on a sheet or percentage of trade or dollar value," said Michael Petefish, a 33-year old Trump supporter and fifth generation farmer in southern Minnesota.

Standing on the farm he will likely run for the next 40 years, he added, "This is multi-generational American families, your base, that you are now squarely putting into financial peril."

[...]

Every morning he wakes up and checks two things: The weather and the price of soybeans. Over the last two weeks, as soybeans tanked, he said his farm value has lost around $250,000.

[...]

"A quarter of a million dollars in the last two weeks, somehow you have to find a way to sleep at night."

  CNN

So maybe it won't be 40 years.

Petefish is one of the thousands of farmers who have seen the price of their crops tank in the face of escalating trade rhetoric between the United States and China. Growers in the area talk of their farms losing over $200,000 in value as commodity prices slump.

[...]

"I cringe," Dale Stevermer, a soybean farmer and pork producer, said when asked about President Donald Trump's tit-for-tat trade spat with China. "When a tariff even gets talked about, it makes both the buyers and the sellers jumpy. It's going to impact my bottom line, it's going to impact my business livelihood, and, to an extent, it becomes a mental outlook."

"Trade wars are easy to win."

"It's hard not to have some down days," he said, looking out on his 200 acres of soybeans.

Dale Stevermer wouldn't say who he voted for in 2016, but his wife, Lori, said she voted Republican.

Yeah, so did he.

The political irony for people like Petefish and others in southern Minnesota is that they helped propel Trump to the White House, backing the businessman-turned-politician because, in part, they felt he understood their needs better than Hillary Clinton.

And in part because they'd be damned before they'd vote for a woman.  And if they have to vote for a liberal because they don't want Trump any more (if we still get to vote in 2020, they may just sit the next one out.

Soybeans, whose prices hit a nine-year low amid trade fears with China this week, are critical to the economy of bucolic southern Minnesota and the biggest export for the entire state.

[...]

Farmers in the area are not ready to say they regret their vote for Trump but are closely watching how they will fare in the intensifying trade fight as they consider whether to break with the Republican Party in November.

"We have got about a month and a half where we can play with this thing and then after that, these prices have to be corrected, so we urge the administration to do what it has to do and do it quickly," said Tom Slunecka, the CEO of the Minnesota Soybean Association. "If we get into harvest with prices like they are, it will decimate much of farm country."

[...]

The White House, through trade policy aide Peter Navarro, has pledged to take care of farmers like the Stevermer and Petefish.

"President Trump will have the backs of all Americans who may be targeted by Chinese factions," Navarro said, adding that Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and his team "have been working on measures that will have the backs of farmers."

Navarro wouldn't reveal details to reporters.

Gee, I wonder why.

The farm bill passed by two votes and most of its most draconian provisions are DOA in the Senate, where the Democrats still have some influence. Still, it’s a look into the other half of the conservative Republican house of horrors as regards poor children who don’t look like Paul Ryan—and a helluva lot who do, most of them in rural areas that went strongly for the president*. This is Paul Ryan and his House majority leveraging millions of poor children for a tax cut, a better deal in the Senate, and to keep faith with a president* who could care less. At least those kids aren’t in cages, except metaphorical ones. They are free-range children.

  Charles P Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.