Everybody is hurting this time

In today’s economy no one is very happy. High prices and inflation that exceeds wage increases are worse than ever. We middle- and lower-income people are really feeling the pain.

There is one particular group that may receive government assistance to ease the pain. Farmers, who received a $28 billion bailout in 2019, are apparently going to receive more. Those previous payments were to offset losses when China stopped buying our grain, in particular soybeans, in retaliation for the punitive trade policies of the Trump administration.

Now, farmers are supposed to receive another $12 billion to compensate for markets lost due to Trump‘s current tariffs. It won’t help much if they’re facing financial ruin — brought on not only from lost grain markets, but also from the soaring cost of fuel and fertilizer due to the war in Iran.

There’s not a lot sympathy for farmers this time around. Instead, I’m hearing criticism about their bailout. People openly question why they deserve assistance when most of them voted three times for the person whose policies have been killing them for the last several years.

I find myself torn between feeling sympathy and anger. I know what it feels like when times are tough on the farm, but I also wish voters would have been wiser and more responsible about who they nominated and elected to run the country.

A television program about the devastating 1980s farm crisis was produced by my daughter a few years ago. She’s been doing documentaries for IPTV (now called IPBS) for more than 25 years. Her award-winning film about the crisis is still being broadcast today and used in classrooms around the country. Some of the information she used in writing her script was based on our family’s experiences when we were about to lose everything.

There are farmers suffering losses like that today. Their overseas grain markets are severely curtailed by tariff policies; their corn market for USAID destroyed by cancellation of that critical food program; fuel and fertilizer costs are going through the roof because of the war, plus growing seasons are impacted by climate change.

These losses in agriculture can be directly attributed to political mismanagement of trade policies, and ignorance of the consequences of war. So can denial of global warming.

It was predicted America would not do well under a second Trump presidency, and it’s not. Money needed for medical care and food assistance was grabbed for tax cuts, and now it’s going for the war, $2 billion a day. Remember when the national debt was all Republicans could talk about? No one even mentions it anymore, or admits that interest on the debt now surpasses $1 trillion annually.

Millions of Americans are struggling with high prices, yet a White House economist says, “We know the economy is strong because people are spending a lot with their credit cards.” Such idiocy! People are using their credit cards because they don’t have cash to buy even the basics.

During the ’80s farm crisis, we were charged 18% interest on our farm loans. At the time, I was directing a dislocated-farmer program in this area and heard the desperate stories of families who could not make their payments to area banks. Three of those banks closed because of millions of dollars in unpaid loans.

There are good reasons for bitterness today about an election that gave us a president whose policies are leading to anxiety and financial hardship. To be honest, all the warning signs were there.

No one with any common sense really believed high prices and inflation would disappear overnight as was promised. Everyone knew there was no way the war between Ukraine and Russia could be settled on day one, either. We were absolutely certain revenge would be sought against political enemies, and we were definitely aware enrichment of the presidential family from government resources was already underway.

What we didn’t anticipate was inflation would get much worse because of unreliable, unsound economic policies. Or that the price of food, goods and fuel would not come down, but would go substantially higher.

Nor did we think the promise to end all conflicts on foreign soil, would instead become an ill-fated war of choice in the most turbulent part of the world — the Middle East.