Economy 1000+ City Slickers Receive Farmer Welfare

[xcvbn]

TRUMP’S FARMERS BAILOUT MONEY WENT TO MORE THAN 1,000 RESIDENTS OF MAJOR CITIES FOLLOWING CHINA TRADE WAR

Funds from President Donald Trump’s $6 billion bailout to farmers suffering the consequences of his ongoing trade wars with China, Canada, Mexico and countries in Europe were directed to more than 1,000 city slickers in areas like Los Angeles and New York City, a new report shows.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a watchdog organization, found that 1,142 people in the country’s 50 largest cities received bailout payments from the Department of Agriculture. Nine residents of San Francisco, four residents of Los Angeles, five residents of New York City and four residents of Washington, D.C. received the funds, the report found.

Scott Yocom, an architect based in Manhattan, received a $3,300 check from the USDA last month, according to a Washington Post report. He visits his family farm in Ohio for two weeks each year. Yocom, who is currently designing a new terminal at LaGuardia Airport, said he would donate the money back to his family’s farm.

“Regarding city residents: In order to receive a payment, the producer has to meet the minimum Actively Engaged in Farming criteria. Those regulations are used to determine eligibility for all of our other Farm Bill commodity programs,” a USDA spokesperson said in an email to Newsweek. “The producers also have to maintain ownership over the commodity for which they are receiving a payment... A producer has to prove actual production of a crop to qualify for marketing facilitation assistance.”

The Washington Post contacted other urban-living bailout recipients, who largely said that while they were far removed from the day-to-day activities of their family farms, they were involved in management decisions.

House Republicans, meanwhile, have included a provision in their new farm bill that would allow farmers’s nieces, nephews, and cousins to receive farm subsidies regardless of where they live and work. Another provision would do away with means testing and allow large, corporate farms to receive government subsidies and payouts.

When the USDA established the bailout program, they capped payouts at $125,000, but more than 85 recipients were granted more money. Red Gum Planting Company Number 2, a soybean farm in Ferriday, Louisiana, received nearly $440,000. Maxwell Farms, another soybean farm based in Mississippi, took in $386,643.

EWG received information for about 87,704 bailout payments worth a total of $356 million, far less than the president promised farmers. More rounds of funding are expected at a later date, but details are still sparse.

Tariffs working wonders- THANKS TRUMP!

Did you get your welfare check, @Farmer Br0wn? What are you gonna buy with my money?

 

[Mr Holmes]

TRUMP’S FARMERS BAILOUT MONEY WENT TO MORE THAN 1,000 RESIDENTS OF MAJOR CITIES FOLLOWING CHINA TRADE WAR


Tariffs working wonders- THANKS TRUMP!

Did you get your welfare check, @Farmer Br0wn? What are you gonna buy with my money?

A shitty bailout bill means the tariffs aren't working?

 

[HARRISON_3]

Not to worry, the president gave himself an A+!

 

[panamaican]

Every accountant, lawyer, tax planner, etc. knows that farms are great tax havens. Of course, city slickers are getting the recent round of farmer's welfare, they've been getting it for decades. To their credit, Congress has tried to limit the potential abuse in the past.

 

[Big Nasty Edison]

I hope they drug test all those Welfare Queen Farmers first.

 

[D3thr0n3d K1ng]

WELFARE BAD!!

Unless it goes to a rich person,farm or corporation then... WELFARE GOOD!!!

 

[MicroBrew]

Where are all the rightwing voices decrying this as "socialism" , "government handouts" , "welfare" etc..
They are always quick to point out when 'those' people get welfare. We all know who 'those' people are.

 

[Rational Poster]

TRUMP’S FARMERS BAILOUT MONEY WENT TO MORE THAN 1,000 RESIDENTS OF MAJOR CITIES FOLLOWING CHINA TRADE WAR


Tariffs working wonders- THANKS TRUMP!

Did you get your welfare check, @Farmer Br0wn? What are you gonna buy with my money?

It's become a ploy of the rich to buy some land and produce a minimal amount of agriculture to be considered a farm so they can get free money and tax breaks.

I think if you produce as little as $1000 in agriculture you can claim that you're a farm.

 

[Rational Poster]

Where are all the rightwing voices decrying this as "socialism" , "government handouts" , "welfare" etc..
They are always quick to point out when 'those' people get welfare. We all know who 'those' people are.

I tried to point this out when it happened but no one seemed to care.

 

[NoDak]

Not related, but EWG peddles pseudoscience.

the tariffs aren't working?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...g-for-most-of-trump-s-trade-war-research-says

President Donald Trump is succeeding in making China pay most of the cost of his trade war.

That’s the conclusion of a new paper from EconPol Europe, a network of researchers in the European Union. U.S. companies and consumers will only pay 4.5 percent more after the nation imposed 25 percent tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods, and the other 20.5 percent toll will fall on Chinese producers, according to authors Benedikt Zoller-Rydzek and Gabriel Felbermayr.

The trade dispute between the U.S. and China is showing slim hope of abating as the leaders of the two nations prepare to meet in Argentina this month. According to Zoller-Rydzek and Felbermayr, the tariffs will do what Trump has longed for: They will cut American imports of affected Chinese goods by more than a third, and lower the bilateral trade deficit by 17 percent.

CFIUS also needs to continue slamming the door on every single attempted Chinese acquisition of US tech assets as they've been doing. The Foreign Direct Investment from China would preferably be absolute zero, we don't want nor need it besides the fact it's completely inorganic and they are not market-based transactions.

 

[NoDak]

Where are all the rightwing voices decrying this as "socialism" , "government handouts" , "welfare" etc... They are always quick to point out when 'those' people get welfare. We all know who 'those' people are.

They need to shut the fuck up about the social safety net.

 

[MicroBrew]

Every accountant, lawyer, tax planner, etc. knows that farms are great tax havens. Of course, city slickers are getting the recent round of farmer's welfare, they've been getting it for decades. To their credit, Congress has tried to limit the potential abuse in the past.

Many years ago, some time in the 00s, I recal it being reported that Ted Turner (CNN founder) received farm subsidies.

 

[MicroBrew]

They need to shut the fuck up about the social safety net.

It's become a ploy of the rich to buy some land and produce a minimal amount of agriculture to be considered a farm so they can get free money and tax breaks.

I think if you produce as little as $1000 in agriculture you can claim that you're a farm.

Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the middle class and working class folks who don't qualify for welfare.

 

[NoDak]

Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the middle class and working class folks who don't qualify for welfare.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w24567

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-antipoverty-20180507-story.html

Few U.S. government efforts are consistently more vilified than anti-poverty programs. They're dismissed as ineffective and ridiculed as giveaways to undeserving recipients.

A new paper puts the lie to these assertions by showing that the nation's most important anti-poverty efforts all succeed in serving their goals — in the case of Social Security, spectacularly. The authors, Bruce D. Meyer and Derek Wu of the University of Chicago, used administrative statistics from six major programs to demonstrate that five of the six "sharply reduce deep poverty" (that is, income below 50% of the federal poverty line) and the sixth has a "pronounced" impact among the working poor.

The programs that reduce deep poverty are Social Security; Supplemental Security Income; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which is what commonly is known as "welfare"; housing assistance; and food stamps, or SNAP. The sixth is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps mostly families that earn around 150% of the poverty line. (That line is about $25,100 in annual income for a family of four.)

In each case, Weber and Wu found that the effect of each program has been materially underestimated by traditional measurements. That's because the earlier estimates are based on Census Bureau surveys that underreport benefits from these programs. As a result, the authors say, the effects of food stamps and TANF are underestimated by one-third to one-half, and the impact of Social Security is underestimated by as much as 44%. Their research covered 2008-13, the period of the Great Recession.

"You don't want to say that our programs haven't reduced poverty," Meyer told me. "They've had huge effects in reducing poverty."

These findings are important because all these programs, with the possible exception of the EITC, come under constant attack by budget-cutters and other conservatives. The claim is that, despite the expenditure of trillions of dollars in public funds, the poverty rate has barely budged in more than a half-century.

Some other supplemental material. The expansive welfare state (in terms of spending) IS in large part effectively/a result of corporate welfare on account of low and stagnant wages, though kind of the other side of the coin from the point.

As far as Medicaid:

... People need to shut the fuck up about the social safety net. Like really, shut the fuck up.

 

[MadSquabbles500]

Subsidies; whatever form it may take, no matter the sector, should only be given to those that need it. Rich city slicker farmers dont need it.

Why do farmers need subsidies again? They make the thing that all of us have to work our butts off to obtain in order to survive and enjoy life. That being food.

 

[NoDak]

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/view/articles/2018-05-16/the-u-s-social-safety-net-has-improved-a-lot

There’s a common misperception that the U.S. is the land of small government, where the poor receive little assistance. To many on the left, the U.S. is a uniquely bad actor, eschewing the enlightened social democracy of Western Europe and leaving the economically unfortunate to suffer. Those on the right tend to take a more positive view of the same notion, trumpeting the U.S.’s small welfare state as evidence of a commitment to free markets and self-reliance.

As with most myths, there is a grain of truth to the idea. With the repeal of the individual health-care mandate, the U.S. has returned to its status as one of the only developed countries not to provide some form of universal health care. The U.S. spends a bit less of its gross domestic product on social spending than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as a whole

But already it’s apparent that the U.S.’s reputation as a bastion of cutthroat capitalism is exaggerated. Its social safety net is only a couple of percentage points below the OECD total, and larger than that of Canada, Australia and South Korea.

Furthermore, U.S. government transfers have been increasing over time. The U.S. system of taxation and spending has become more progressive during the past two decades. Per-capita government transfers were about $8,567 a person in 2016, up from about $5,371 at the turn of the century (adjusted for inflation) — an increase of 60 percent.

The increasing generosity of the U.S. safety net in the 21st century began under President George W. Bush. Although mostly remembered for the war in Iraq, Bush in many ways fulfilled his promise to be a compassionate conservative. Major expansions of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, were carried out in 2002 and 2008.

Bush’s Medicare reform added prescription-drug benefits to the government’s premier health-care program. And Bush’s so-called housing-first policy reduced homelessness dramatically during his second term. Overall, real per-capita government transfers increased by about 38 percent during the eight years of the Bush administration.

Under President Barack Obama the pace of welfare expansion slowed a bit, probably as a result of the Great Recession. But it didn’t stop. Food stamps continued to expand, extended unemployment insurance helped many during the recession, and homelessness kept declining. Obama also implemented a number of tax credits for low-income families and passed the Affordable Care Act, which subsidizes health insurance.

After 16 years of expansions in the safety net under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, the U.S. has a much more robust welfare state than people seem to realize. The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, using the U.S. Census Bureau’s new comprehensive poverty measure, estimates that government transfers have driven child poverty to a record low. Thanks mostly to government aid, the number of American children in poverty has fallen from more than one in four in the early 1990s to about one in seven today.

Meanwhile, recent research shows that U.S. antipoverty programs are more effective than had been realized. In a new paper, the University of Chicago’s Bruce Meyer and Derek Wu analyze five major means-tested programs — Social Security, food stamps, public assistance, the earned income tax credit and housing assistance — in terms of how much they actually increase poor people’s income.

 

[KONG-D'SNT-TAP]

Not to worry, the president gave himself an A+!

Well only because there is nothing higher or he would’ve given himself that grade.

Like an A ++ lulz

 

[jefferz]

Many years ago, some time in the 00s, I recal it being reported that Ted Turner (CNN founder) received farm subsidies.

Turner probably got it because he had hay land for his cattle and it didn’t produce enough for that year.

 

[Seano]

WELFARE BAD!!

Unless it goes to a rich person,farm or corporation then... WELFARE GOOD!!!

Literally no one thinks that.

 

[D3thr0n3d K1ng]

Literally no one thinks that.

Literally you and lots of other people think that but are too cowardly to admit it because you know it makes you hypocritical.