Republican Farm Policy Makes Perfect Sense

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Observation 1: Farmers tend to be fairly well off. SNAP (food stamp) recipients tend to be poor.

Observation 2: Republicans want to keep federal subsidies in place for farmers, but they want to cut SNAP funding for the poor.

Question: What ideological principle can account for this? Let’s try a few:

  • Libertarianism? Nope. They’d want to cut both.
  • Generic small government conservatism? Nope. They’d also cut both.
  • Liberalism? Nope. Liberals would keep SNAP (or expand it) and cut farm subsidies (or leave them alone for narrow political reasons).
  • Pragmatic technocratism? Nope. Farm subsidies aren’t especially good for the economy and SNAP is reasonably well targeted at genuine need.
  • Class warfare? That would do it.

There’s nothing mystifying about this. Republicans want to cut taxes on the rich and cut spending on the poor. That’s been their basic domestic ideology for decades at least. And guess what? Agricultural subsidies are effectively a tax cut for farmers while SNAP reductions cut spending on the poor. As a bonus, farmers tend to vote for Republicans while poor people tend to vote for Democrats. What’s hard to understand?

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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