While Trump is considering bailing out the farmers, he spent little time deciding to rescue Argentina with $40 billion in handouts.
I keep reading that Trump’s tariffs are hurting farmers, thus they deserve bailouts to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.
“The soybean farmers of our country are being hurt because China is, for ‘negotiating’ reasons only, not buying. We’ve made so much money on tariffs that we are going to take a small portion of that money and help our farmers,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. Source
When Trump placed tariffs on China during his first term, Chinese imports of U.S. soybeans plummeted, devastating farmers’ balance sheets. The the U.S. Department of Agriculture has estimated that soybean growers accounted for more than 70% of the financial losses incurred by farmers during Trump’s first trade war.
The government sent about $23 billion to farmers to compensate. While soybean exports recovered in the following years, China has been squeezing American farmers out and has spent heavily to improve the agriculture supply chain in South American countries such as Brazil to fill the gap.
The Republican tax-and-spending bill passed earlier this year took money from the Commodity Credit Corporation, which Trump used to bail out farmers in his first term, making it unavailable to use this year.
The number of farm operations filing for bankruptcy remains at historically low levels but has jumped sharply this year as a crisis in the agricultural economy drags on.
In the second quarter, there were 93 filings, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, up from 88 in the first quarter and nearly double the 47 at the end of 2024.
The Federal Reserve’s recent survey of farm financial conditions found that weaker income has reduced liquidity for farmers, boosting demand for financing.
At the same time, credit conditions deteriorated with roughly 30% of respondents in the Chicago Fed and Kansas City Fed districts reporting lower repayment rates versus a year ago, while the Minneapolis Fed region’s share was around 40% and the St. Louis Fed’s was 50%.
To be sure, the recent spike in bankruptcies doesn’t mean farmers are going out of business, the Minneapolis Fed pointed out. A Chapter 12 filing can help them avoid total liquidation and allow them to continue operating, perhaps on a smaller scale after some restructuring.
Republicans are notorious liars, so expect the lies about how the farmers deserve to be saved. If the farmers deserve saving, then so do all the businesses that are being hurt by Trump’s tariffs. We are all Americans, and who we vote for should not determine whether we receive handouts or not—handouts for everyone or handouts for none, certainly not for other countries, America First.
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