Summary
Trump’s move to defund USAID is causing unintended consequences for American farmers and businesses.
The Washington Post reports that USAID purchases billions in U.S. agricultural products, with American farms supplying 41% of its food aid.
The funding freeze has already halted $340 million in food shipments, leaving tons of wheat stranded in Houston.
Experts warn this decision directly harms American jobs and businesses, as much of USAID’s aid is administered through U.S.-based organizations employing American workers.
Stop pretending it had any sane goal.
Everything he’s ruining is important, and the far-reaching consequences are not suited for this asinine chin-stroking.
The Washington Post reports that USAID purchases billions in U.S. agricultural products, with American farms supplying 41% of its food aid.
I did not know this myself.
Basically all of foreign “giving” by America is done by purchasing American goods and giving them in exchange for goodwill, soft power, regional stability, favorable trade deals, or other political capital.
Many Americans don’t understand any of that and think their tax money is going in the form of a check to people who don’t care and don’t give us anything in exchange. And it’s not like this is a secret, it’s just kinda gauche for the government to explicitly state it
That’s the thing about how headlines mislead. When they say, “US sends $x in aide or weapons,” what they really mean is that the US is subsidizing an American lobby group. Not to say that is bad thing, just that it gives the wrong impression.
Everyone knows international aid is to support local economies
I don’t think anything is backfiring
I hope every farmer who voted for Trump loses their farm. Literally.
Seriously fuck these people its obvious what Trump is about. He did this the first time he was in office
https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=102979
A 2022 US dept of agriculture publication, the overview: “This report provides a detailed look at the impact of retaliatory [2018] tariffs by State and commodity and estimates the direct export losses associated with the trade conflict.” Added 2018 for context
Takes two clicks to get to the summary. I can’t tell what the US even won out of the war, but looks like we lost damn bigly. And are pushing the same tarrifs again 💀
Once countries find and make deals with other suppliers they rarely return. Farmers were bailed out last time but a crashing economy is going to make it difficult this time unless the orange Jabba just prints more money again, then look for runaway inflation.
I think that would affect the rest of us, because that means family farms might be taken over by corporations, which is already a huge problem. Because of the downstream effects on the nation as a whole, I sincerely hope they learn their damned lesson.
Do they deserve to lose everything for their stupidity? Sure. Do the rest of us deserve to pay for their stupidity with an increasingly corporatized or weakened agricultural base? No.
Most small farms die when the next family member in line to take over doesn’t want to do it. This is personal for me because my father was a farmer and died when I was a teenager. My family now just rent out the land we own and I ended up not becoming a farmer because I don’t want to die young like he did. Farming is a stressful as hell job and it’s getting more expensive to even get into it anymore unless you got investors or inherit everything like my father did. If you don’t, then you’ll be in debt forever.
Wait until they cut crop insurance subsidies.
That would honestly kill the industry. Most farmers rely way too much on it.
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Hopefully, they lose it to agricorps, and then get pissed about being exploited, and come back on the side of the working class.
Just sit back, plan for famine, plagues and war. Find your community. Buy used, buy from locals and cut way back on vacations, eating out and travel. Grow a garden, it’s like printing money. Hunt, fish, forage or get into inexpensive but useful new hobbies.
The violent right is dumb but they will finally out who is screwing them and it isn’t immigrants, gays or DEI. They can’t blame Democrats either because Republicans control everything now. They created this monster, let them fight him.I once thought it was that simple so I understand where people on here are coming from on all this. But after ten years in the San Joaquin valley, ag central, I can tell you, having grown up in Seattle and thus seeing the contrast, there is a distinct power in fundamental formal education and when that is lacking it doesn’t matter what happens to them, the powers-that-be always know how gullible they are and will mold them like playdoh. I think the schools need to be funded by the central government not local governments. Big city liberals should have to put up frankly with their local neighborhood schools being taken down a few notches through evenly spreading education funds across jurisdictions if they don’t want schools way out in the boondocks to be as vapid as one finds them. If you won’t pay for their education my attitude is don’t complain about their politics and try your best not to complain about their intelligence. I find that hard myself - I get frustrated all the time with the people in this small town, but I still try to remind myself what I’ve learned about education itself and I try to have compassion. Maybe that’s what ten years out in the boondocks teaches a Seattleite.
Well, if they don’t turn around, they become far less effectual when dirt poor, thanks to the system they created. And the poorer they are, the faster they die off.
If you won’t pay for their education my attitude is don’t complain about their politics and try your best not to complain about their intelligence.
We already do pay for their education. What do you think the Department of Ed does? Title IX funding? It comes from blue states.
I try to have compassion
I’ll have compassion for them, once they stop being class traitors.
My understanding is that it’s the taxes from the surrounding neighborhoods where homes are located that fundamentally pay for schools.
Partly, they do. Mostly, it’s title ix funding.
Right? Reap what you sow lol
“gambit”
Sure, let’s call it that.
It’s the normalization blues
The famous chess move: king’s gambit. Sacrifice your king for victory. Wait a minute . . .
President Musk would be just fine sacrificing Trump.
It’s a 30D chess move!
Donald Trump may have thought that defunding the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would only hurt foreigners – but it turns out he could actually be mistaken.
😮
“May have thought” - that would be to strong for him. Thinking has never been his strong point. He reacts to what people around him tell him. He picks up ideas at random and turns them into executive orders.
Right, he probably only “may have thought” what Musk told him to do, which was to hurt USAID for investigating Starlink+Russia
Almost like they don’t know what the purpose of government is…
The purpose of government is to funnel taxpayer money into the hands of the rich, and to enforce laws against the poor, duh.
The purpose of the government is to ensure nobody can say “woke” stuff, apparently.
And almost like they don’t realize that large portions of the US economy is highly dependent on the US’s interventionalist stance.
It’s like every fucking kid learns in history class. The biggest beneficiary of the US Marshall plan was the US - the US is constantly making international decisions that drive more business to the US… those decisions usually start as deficits driving aide abroad and then form strong economic and diplomatic bonds that benefit everyone.
Trump is torpedoing the US’s relationships abroad and by doing so the US economy.
This is the actual “liberal world order” that Conservatives want to dismantle. It’s one created by the US providing needed assistance while growing itself. The view that a rising tide lifts all ships.
China can pick it up. :/
Britain had to fuck up and destabilize a shitload of countries to build its empire. China is being handed it’s global dominance on a silver platter due to the fact that the US several other Western nations are too far up their own white supremacist libertarian assholes to actually fix shit.
I mean Milei in Argentina is such an unmitigated disaster it isn’t funny, but they praise him like he is somehow uplifting the country when now 7 out of 10 Argentinian children are living in poverty.
You’re currently watching an amalgam of Nazi Germany and the levellers and diggers from the 17th century England.
Currently you are experiencing what happens when a bunch of angry people have no plans on what to do after their anger is exhausted. There is no interest in doing anything but burn it all to the ground.
Something like almost 80% of farmers voted Trump. Those leopards are eating good
They’ll stand by their vote while blaming democrats for the dei hires responsible for their farms getting shut down.
Those leopards are eating good
The leopards are becoming obese now, WONT SOMEONE THINK OF THE LEOPARDS
Ah yes, the Brexiters! Quite an overlap of talking points too. Minus the healthcare, there’s non to speak of in US.
Unfortunately, we won’t be in the coming months.
Unlikely. This is food that was going overseas. This could actually bring food prices down while bankrupting farmers. The next few seasons of crops is when we start to starve.
Farmers are going to get hammered with retaliatory tariffs on exports too. Time for them to find out I guess.
But they just wanted to have someone to punch down on the trans, the brown people, and force everyone to go to their church, that’s all!
If they didn’t learn last go around, do we expect them to this time. I remember during his first term, his tarrifs made China reduce purchasing (I forgot which crop) from the US. Instead, they looked to other countries like Brazil. To combat the lost revenue to farmers, he created a fund to aid them.
I watched a great video about this yesterday: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SS2dSOiMN6g
Tariffs and other limitations on exports from the USA to China have only helped to make China stronger and reduce its dependence on the USA, either by relying on other countries or by them producing a better product domestically.
That’s also a major part of the reason why DeepSeek-R1 was much cheaper to train than OpenAI’s equivalent models. The USA restricted exports of high end Nvidia GPUs and AI accelerators to China, so people in China had to do the same job with cheaper, lower-end hardware.
China is already far ahead in many industries. They have electric vehicles that can go 600 miles on a single charge, while most EVs in the USA barely get half of that. People in other countries are enjoying their cheap Chinese vehicles, but they’re banned in the USA and we end up with more expensive vehicles that aren’t as good.
Soybeans
Mate, the orange halfwit has just flooded a huge number of farms in California. They’re still gonna vote for him.
I don’t know if him opening the dams flooded any farms, but come summertime, they’re going to be hurting as the reservoirs empty out long before they should have.
I mean, if they vote for Democrats, they might turn gay or woke.
goke
Well, it’s what they voted for in their blind hatred of everything that made America great.
Seriously, only people permanently stuck in adolescence with bullshit Libertarian notions about government believe that you can BREAK government and things will turn out well.
Only a dumbfuck Randroid type (or maybe the random leftist veering on wrapping all the way around the horseshoe) thinks that burning it all down is going to lead to better things…it’s easy if you are totally ignorant to think that “government doesn’t do anything for ME” as an actual thing you believe.
… “government doesn’t do anything for ME” as an actual thing you believe.
This happens because people take completely for granted all of the things government quietly does for them.
It’s kind of the same as “Why do we even have an IT department? Everything works, what are they even doing?”
Such an apt analogy - this actually happens all the time in corporations. IT tends to just get treated as a cost center, most especially if everything is running smoothly. Stupid people at companies will often just look at the price of that and think it’s time to fuck with it…
It’s almost the same thing with vaccines. A whole lot of dumbasses think vaccines “never did them no good”, because vaccines are a victim of their own success, and most people alive today have not really seen how bad it can get without them [1].
Idiots can then try to pin the state of health we have, largely thanks to vaccines, on other things like septic systems, “eating healthy”, etc…
[1] I’ve anecdotally noticed that for the most part, you didn’t see older generations going for that anti-vax shit. It seems to have started with some (younger) boomers, a lot of Gen-Xers and on down. But again, that’s because it’s an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of thing. Some of the older people (like Greatest Generation) saw how life can be incredibly cruel w/o vaccines…sadly, all that wisdom is dying out and our education system sucks, so this wisdom was not passed on to enough people. Critical thinking is probably as bad as ever, and we are probably on the verge of FAFO…
Toxins and crystals and essential oils, oh my!
“Haw haw!”
Trump: “If food prices are so high, what if we just… keep all the food here? That will bring them down, right?”
Dustbowl 2025, fuck yeah! Bringing back the classics!
(Farmers won’t or can’t spend money to plant -> too many fallow fields -> giant walls of airborne topsoil)
Murph!
Surely they’ll still buy those goods and give them to Americans. They aren’t just dissolving programs and making money disappear, couldn’t be.
According to AOC this whole cutting nonsense is because they need to come up with up to 4 billion dollars to get the votes to pass their new tax reduction plan for the rich.
I had some nutjob on a local group tell me that Trump has removed federal taxes as if I and everyone else can’t clearly see that we’re still paying the same federal taxes on my paystubs. I can’t believe how brainwashed some people have become.
Also tangentially related but I filled out my tax return today and owe a lot more this year thanks to his bullshit 2018 tax bill that capped SALT deductions, removed the child tax credit, and only gave temporary cuts to people who aren’t in the 1%. I can only imagine that his supporters are either retired, unemployed, or on social security to also not realize how much more he’s forcing us to pay to the government.
Yeah, they couldn’t possibly be cruel or incompetent, not them!
Similarly, weapon shipments to Israel and Ukraine are subsidies of American weapons manufacturers.
I wonder which party farmers and defense contractors tend to vote for?
A fair amount of those weapons needed to be used anyway as well. This gets them used, and builds up a fresher stockpile creating/maintaining jobs.
Not only that, the dollar amount of the aid is the cost for replacements, not the cost of the old stock. Zelensky said the current value of the stocks they have received is only a fraction of what the US has said they actually donated in aid.
They didn’t need to be used. They could have been destroyed instead.
Well sure, and to commit genocide I’d rather they have been destroyed, but in the case of Ukraine, it’s better than destroying them.
Yeah, I agree for Ukraine.
Not only is it better to give them to Ukraine than to just destroy them, it also lets American generals and weapons manufacturers learn how they work in a real combat situation, and in conditions they may not have much experience with.
With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, American generals and weapons manufacturers have some experience with desert warfare. But, Ukraine gives them a chance to see how their systems do in sub-zero weather in winter. They also get to see how their systems do against a near-peer enemy, vs. how they do against guerillas and militias.
The war in Ukraine is a very smart “investment” for the American military and for American military companies. They get to learn lessons while not having any American soldiers at risk, and while massively damaging an enemy like Russia.
Giving them to Israel is bullshit though. Not only is Israel in the midst of an ethnic cleansing campaign, there also aren’t many useful lessons to be learned by another campaign of smashing civilians, guerillas and militias in a desert.
aren’t many useful lessons to be learned by another campaign of smashing civilians, guerillas and militias in a desert.
Just got me laughing thinking of a multi million dollar munition being shot at civilians with no defences (okay not that part, but the next part) and the military contractors being like, yep, the missile works when there’s (edit: zero) counter measures to stop it, in conditions we’ve tested a hundred times before in combat. Guess we don’t learn anything this time!
Yeah, sometimes you have to laugh so you don’t cry.
