Agricultural law professor lays it out: “A Donald Trump presidency would devastate rural America.” We concur.
Tsitrian’s note: I’m borrowing/paraphrasing/condensing Schneider’s thoughts from an op-ed that appeared October 27 in The Des Moines Register, where it is most definitely worth a read in its entirety. I’m doing this exercise in transcription to reinforce the thoughts, expressed here any number of times, on why Trump and his policies are bad, bad, bad for rural American states like South Dakota.
University of Arkansas Law School professor of agricultural law Susan Schneider lays it out succinctly and with passion: “A Donald Trump presidency would devastate rural America.” Schneider grew up on a family farm in Minnesota, is a tenured law professor and has written “Food, Farming, and Sustainability,” which is now in its third edition.
Schneider’s rural background and academic credentials add much to the many critiques, posted here, of Trump and the way his policies have done a disservice to our nation's rural economy. That disservice was tacitly acknowledged during his term in office, when Trump had to bail out many farmers with billions of dollars of “mitigation payments.” Those payments helped offset the long-lasting financial damage done by his poorly conceived trade policies.
Professor Schneider starts off on why Trump’s plan for widespread tariffs is full of holes. Says she, “Trump’s plan for massive tariffs will invoke a trade war that destroys U.S. farm export markets.” She adds they will force our commodity markets to “collapse” because farm prices and incomes will “crash.” She also notes the point, frequently made here, that “tariffs are not paid for by other countries — they are absorbed by U.S. manufacturing and/or passed on to U.S. consumers.”
Schneider next addresses Trump’s overly-simplified notion that mass deportation is his way of fixing the immigration problem. It isn’t, and anybody with a speck of understanding of the American agricultural labor force’s make-up knows that undocumented aliens are an integral part of it. Says Schneider, “Trump’s pledge to round up and deport all undocumented immigrants will devastate our food system.” Schneider reminds us that nearly half of our farm workers are undocumented aliens. Without them, “food prices will skyrocket, and farm businesses will fail.”
Trump’s proposed tax cuts are the next target of Schneider’s critique. She says that Trump’s tax cuts “for the wealthy combined with widespread tariffs will balloon the deficit, raising interest rates and fueling massive inflation.” Farmers who have to endure low farm prices will have to rely on loans to cover their reduced incomes, paying higher interest rates and pledging more collateral. Concludes Schneider: “Just like in the 1980s, a farm financial crisis can be anticipated.”
Schneider also addresses Trump's indifference to climate change, which the former president refers to as a “hoax.” His plans to dismantle efforts to fight it risk “what our farmers need to survive … a stable, predictable weather cycle.”
On antitrust and lack of competition in the food system, Schneider believes that the Biden-Harris administration has shown courage to “take on big industry, to demand fair contracts, and to provide support to small businesses in meat processing,” but that “all that goes away in a Trump administration.”
Concludes Schneider: “Think realistically about what a Trump presidency will do, not just to our nation but to your community.”
Thanks, professor. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.
Photo: public domain, wikimedia commons
