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Farm Welfare Queens Get Royal Treatment from Trump

No wonder rural America cussed President Barack Obama and clings blindly to Donald Trump: the Manhattan billionaire has showered farmers with far more welfare checks than the previous Administration did.

According to the FDIC’s Richard Cofer, who presented a wealth of instructive economic data to the South Dakota Banking Commission last week, Trump has handed out more subsidies to farmers to make up for their market failures than the Obama Administration did during most of its second term:

Richard Cofer, Jr., Regional Manager, FDIC Division of Insurance & Research, presentation to South Dakota Banking Commission, 2020.08.27, slide 28.
Richard Cofer, Jr., Regional Manager, FDIC Division of Insurance & Research, presentation to South Dakota Banking Commission, 2020.08.27, slide 28.

Note that the one year where Obama’s farm welfare checks outpaced any of Trump’s annual handouts, 2016, was a year when farmer revenues really tanked and farmers really needed more help. Trump’s tariffs and insecurities led him to give farmers more than twice the socialist support in 2019 than Obama gave in any of his last four years in charge.

Trump is having to backfill because he wrecked the good relations we had with one of our farmers’ biggest customers, China:

Cofer, 2020.08.27, slide 31.
Cofer, 2020.08.27, slide 31.

Cofer also notes that South Dakota farmers have received $450 million dollars from the USDA Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, the seventh-largest state take in the nation so far:

Richard Cofer, Jr., Regional Manager, FDIC Division of Insurance & Research, presentation to South Dakota Banking Commission, 2020.08.27, slide 28.
Cofer, 2020.08.27, slide 28.

That’s about $15,200 per South Dakota farm. How much federal coronavirus aid has your business gotten?

Minnesota has 2.3 times as many farms as South Dakota but has only received 1.28 times more USDA coronavirus farm aid. That’s $8,370 per Minnesota farm, only 55% of what South Dakota’s socialist farms have received.

Thank goodness we replaced Barack Obama with a billionaire who really shares our faith in socialism to support our farmers through these hard years of continual market failures.

16 Comments

  1. mike from iowa 2020-08-31 13:12

    What were farmers saying about not wanting handouts?

    drumpf…near term pain for long term pain. The world’s greatest negotiator proves his mettle.

  2. moses6 2020-08-31 14:04

    Can some one here tell me the subsidys queen net worth and also for what she will receive from the Fed Govt retirement system if she is eligible.I do believe you have to serve six years to get a pension of about 16 grand at age 62 .I think then it goes to the moon .Maybe Thune can tell how much he will get when he retires .Help please.

  3. Jake 2020-08-31 17:47

    When it comes to ‘socialism’ South Dakota is well-known to be against it verbally, but first in line at the hog-trough of government handouts and spending. Our Air Force base and it’s portion of the military budget is a form of socialism, is it not? How about the roads we travel on, the use of Air Traffic controllers when flying, the heavy input of Federal bucks into the police budgets, the military pensions of many over-paid ‘lifers’, the VA system, the much federal assistance to the fossil fuels industries, medical dollars and grants from feds, the hugely assisted farm sector and the list goes on, does it not? “Socialism” is a nasty word when it was used by the US to describe the Soviets in the Cold War and Trump uses it as a fear word against Democrats (who seem to believe that we all owe good will to each other and should pay according to our means).

  4. Cory Allen Heidelberger Post author | 2020-08-31 18:05

    I welcome South Dakota’s admission that it survives on socialism. That admission would help make our politics much more honest… and possibly more effective.

  5. mike from iowa 2020-08-31 18:23

    Master, why not publish a column on how the state elites thrive on socialist moneys from the federal gubmint and how the state can’t survive without it? Put their feet to the fire and let the whole state know they are hypocrites of the first order.

  6. grudznick 2020-08-31 18:31

    Let us name these elite fellows, specifically, and not just throw a bunch of out-of-state name-caller names out there. Put down, in this newspaper column, names like “T. Denny”, “Mr. Prostrollo”, “Mr. Novstrup, the elder”, “The Brothers Hustead”, or whoever these socialist bossturds are.

  7. o 2020-08-31 18:56

    Maybe instead of defunding and privatizing Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, the government should seriously look at privatizing farming?

  8. grudznick 2020-08-31 19:23

    That, Mr. o, is a wonderful idea that should be explored. _the government_ should seriously look at that. You should have a law bill put forth to do just that, unless by _the government_ you mean the county. Or maybe you mean the feds? It depends I guess on what the details of your idea are, unless there’s no real idea just an opinion on the defending Social Securities. Because that would be bad, that would be very bad.

  9. Straight Outta Ridge 2020-08-31 19:28

    The website http://www.ewg.org has a link to individuals in each county and how much they have received.
    In Oglala Lakota County, the biggest complainers of assistance going to poor needy tribal members are themselves tribal members who capitalized on tribally subsidized leases in addition to USDA farm subsidies.

  10. grudznick 2020-08-31 19:58

    Not if we privatize all farming, Mr. H, and put the Mennonites out of work.

  11. leslie 2020-08-31 19:58

    Trump too receives royal though unlawful treatment from a federal appeals court concerning subpoenas of executive witnesses against him. The court, reasoning Adam Schiff’s committee has *no cause of action* to compel Trump’s fired lawyer Don Mcgann to testify, said:

    [Psst. The Republican SD legislature is gonna love this. Rounds is wickedly grinning.]

    If Congress…determines that its current mechanisms leave it unable to adequately enforce its subpoenas, it remains free to enact a statute that makes the House’s requests for information judicially enforceable.

    [The Senate already has such a statute. President Trump would have to sign this new law for the House. Catch 22! I]f any institution is well- positioned to “perceive” those new conditions, to assess Congress’s needs, to balance those needs against the countervailing policy considerations, and then “to design the appropriate remedy,” that institution is Congress.
    ***
    So I say don’t be counting on Federal Courts to interpret Constitutional “norms” like impeachment trial, or congressional oversight, or checks and balances, or advice and consent, or anything else political in nature.

    So far. More appeals to follow. This is why Pelosi and Schiff impeached Trump when the clock was running.

    Trump however lied to prosecutors concerning written questions. But EB5 “socialist” Rounds likely did too, covered by this blog at the time.

  12. T 2020-08-31 21:50

    You had to have grain on hand to apply
    No one I know did or received this aid
    So those sitting with grain in bins are the ones who received it. Everyone I know contracts it out and is sold year to year
    To make expenses.
    There should be a list of names

  13. buckobear 2020-08-31 23:07

    Another case of “Grab ’em by the Gubner?”

  14. leslie 2020-09-01 10:48

    “Riot booster” Kristi (who in 2019 lost her appeal of the unconstitutionally crafted Governor’s Riot Booster law aimed at George Soros) incites riots, ironically. She spoke to millions from somewhere, probably from the White House violating as a state employee the civil/criminal Hatch Act (a felony) during the RNC; she is now a fascist it appears to me, really, inciting listeners as our Governor with the following excerpts (she clearly did not “learn a lesson” from the Federal Court striking down her unlawful riot booster law and forcing her to pay legal fees of DFP. Republican elected officials like Gov Noem and Sen Susan Collins (ME) are famously, naively or recklessly stubborn.) She said from the stage, both at Trump’s Mt Rushmore campaign rally and at the Jacksonville,…no, Charlotte,…no, at the White House “RNC” that the United States is:

    “overrun by violent mobs….” [and that]

    “Good, hardworking Americans are left to fend for themselves.”

    Rachel Maddow @24:00, 8.28.2020.

    Maskless Gov Kristi hosted maskless Mark Meadows on stage at Mt Rushmore. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows dismissed the law [Hatch Act violations at RNC activities] Wednesday, telling Politico, “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares.” (Remember Melanie’s fashionista jacket worn to a disaster area carried that same statement as a rear-emblazoned logo from her shoulders to buttocks.) “MARK MEADOWS, WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF: …if we do not get behind our law enforcement, if we do not make sure that we stand up for law and order….this president is doing exactly that. In fact, he’s the only thing that stands between a mob and the American people. You know, first, it’s the statues. Then it’s the businesses. Then it’s their homes.” Sean Hannity, Fox news.

    Kristi has pridefully left SD residents to fend for themselves in the nation’s current top pandemic hotspot.

    Why? Take this test:

    a) Kristi openly dog whistles armed camoflaged paramilitary militias in her public appearances (Jay Bishop AKA Danielson, dead on Portland street, wore an AR15 assault rifle with high capacity magazine and two side arms strapped to his camouflaged clothing and vest, displaying a camouflage Patriot Prayer logo cap and Thin Blue Line patch).

    “This is exactly what happens when homeland security, the intelligence community, the military who are charged with protecting our homeland, are politicized,” Demings, the former chief of police in Orlando, Fla., said on CBS’s Face the Nation. The Hill, 8.30.20

    b) Gov Kristi blindly ideologically does Trump’s bidding which is always devious and malicious. “Asked by a CNN reporter during Monday’s White House briefing about his supporters firing pepper spray and paintballs at protesters in Portland Saturday night, Trump responded that “paint is not bullets,” adding “your [CNN] supporters … shot a young gentleman [armed right wing extremist provocateur*] and killed him, not with paint but with a bullet and I think it’s disgraceful.”

    [Many “fine people on both sides” right, Trump?]

    The president was referring to Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a member of a far-right group, who was shot in the chest after a convoy of hundreds of Trump supporters drove through an anti-racism protest. https://www.voanews.com/2020-usa-votes/trump-visit-kenosha-after-sparring-biden-over-security

    [btw, Trump is actively neutering US international broadcasting agency “VOICE OF AMERICA” like he did CDC, DHS, and is trying to do the same to FDA, replacing agency leadership with “acting” political subversives.]

    c) Kristi has surrounded herself with incompetents (AG Ravensburg, dissolving DENR with director Roberts, and Trump advisors Sidel and Fox News plants Kim Guilfoyle, nepotistic appointees and staff) and is ill-educated to serve as governor. She believes to reelect racist Trump we are in the fight of our lives to save the heart and soul of this country. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TbPLCp2jroc

    d) She can ride somebody else’s horse around a Black Hills fairground waiving a flag and wearing a bull rider’s buckle. And recklessly drives over the speed limit. She’s promoting opening up SD for business. Active cases 2 wks ago-60, last week 350, this week 450 (see SD covid stats). School opens next week. Universities are open and “active”. (Positive co19 infections).

    e) Neither elected Republicans Trump or Noem have sound leadership capacity.

  15. mike from iowa 2020-10-17 18:45

    The New York Times reports:

    For the American farmers President Trump counts on for support, the government money is flowing faster than ever.

    Federal payments to farmers are projected to hit a record $46 billion this year as the White House funnels money to Mr. Trump’s rural base in the South and Midwest ahead of Election Day.

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