Welfare

This email arrived in my inbox Tuesday morning.

You're probably asking yourself how it is that I receive emails from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).  Isn't that sort of stuff for farmers?  The answer would be that I am a farmer - a tree farmer.  And as such am subject to a few of the same rules that corn, pig and cotton farmers are subject-to.

Unfortunately - and unlike - the corn, pig and cotton farmer I will not be reimbursed for self-inflicted losses that have arisen as a consequence of increased Republican taxes assessed on imported steel and aluminum. 


click on the image to read the double-speak



When the Republican administration decided to raise taxes on these imported commodities other nations - like our friendly neighbors to the north and south - responded in-kind.  Allow me to share an example that strikes very close to home.

Ninety percent of the milk produced in Wisconsin is made into cheese.  And ninety percent of said cheese is exported for sale elsewhere.  Heretofore, and prior to the tax increase, Mexico alone imported forty percent of that cheese.  All of that math may make your head ache yet the bottom line is that in response to these new Republican taxes - Canada, Mexico and other countries have responded with taxes of their own on our cheese, pork, cotton and soybeans that they cheerfully purchased from us in the past.  And as a consequence, the prices of these commodities have dropped like a dead duck shot from the sky and long established US export markets are now in peril of being lost to European and South American producers of these commodities.  Hard-working agribusiness in the United States is taking it in the shorts.  And the entire obscenity is self-inflicted.  Pure, economic malpractice.

Astonishingly, the answer to this is that Republican government has decided to use depression era Roosevelt administration legislation to make billions upon billions of dollars in welfare payments to farmers to assuage their economic loss.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Republicans will make welfare payments to people who have suffered financial loss at the hands of their tax increase.  I've lived a long time and not previously seen such economic weirdness as this come along.  Of course, what do I know.  I am only a lowly tree farmer.  Anyone who plants a crop for harvest thirty to a hundred years from now is likely certifiably nuts. 

Nevertheless, this Chamber of Commerce Republican thinks today's Republicans have lost their collective minds.  They ARE certifiable.  It is a strange world indeed when previously normal Republicans behave like post-soviet, central planning, socialist, apparatchiks.   

This is so incredibly bizarre that some days I feel like I've stepped thru the looking glass...