Note: this column is from the spring of last year. But as Trump has promised this week to divert water from Northern California to wealthy farmers in the San Joaquin Valley in California, where I'm from, I found it pertinent to what is going on now. And then of course there is the dreaded socialism scare. -Greg
Go on. Tell Donald Trump — and all us taxpayers — that you don’t want the money.
You don’t want it. Don’t need it. And, yes, don’t deserve it. If you can’t sell your products on the open market, isn’t that your problem?
After all, you’ve been railing for years against “runaway federal spending” and massive federal budget deficits. It’s time to put your money where your mouth is.
Or was all that Tea Party stuff just a big, fat lie?
Midwestern riches
The Ag Racket was in Washington on Thursday collecting another $16 billion of our money, courtesy of the man the farmers put in the White House. Apparently, it’s our job to compensate them for the effects of Trump’s policies. (Trump doled out $11 billion in “aid” last year.)
Don’t you just love these people? Farmers lean Republican by about three to one. Trump swept the farmland states by wide margins. He won Iowa by 10 percentage points, Kansas by 21 and Nebraska by 25.
You can hardly throw a soybean anywhere in the Midwest without hitting small-government conservatives who rail against government spending, bailouts, “welfare” and “socialism.”
But I guess it’s not “welfare” if you’re white.
They’re all in favor of “free markets” — at least for something simple, like, say, health insurance.
It’s when you start to deal with things that are really complex, like wheat or soybeans, that you need the government to step in.
Of course in a truly free market they’d respond to plunging prices by, er, planting something else. But, then, we’ll never know, will we?
Betting (on) the farm
It takes a lot of chutzpah to complain about poverty while making bigger returns than Wall Street.
But then, the Ag Racket has never been shy — at least when it comes to money.
How’d your 401(k) do? The S&P 500 Index
SPX, -0.38% of the biggest U.S. stocks dropped 7%.
But by all means, let’s tax the rest of us to help them out. Where’s that violin?
Farmland returns haven’t had a single negative year since at least the 1990s, according to NCREIF. Farmland was actually in the black in the year of the 9/11 attacks. They were up 15% in 2008, when the Lehman Brothers-induced stock-market crash wiped out half your savings.
This was no anomaly. Over 20 years, farmland has produced twice the average annual returns of the S&P 500: 12.4% versus 5.9%.
And $100 invested in U.S. farmland 20 years ago would be worth more than $1,000 today. The same amount in the U.S. stock market: Just over $300.
Farm revenues have doubled over that time, rising much faster than inflation.
Good for them, right? Well, sure. The laborer is worthy of the hire. Honest profits are a good thing.
Subsidies galore
But during that time they’ve been pocketing billions of subsidies from taxpayers. Since 1999 the direct payments alone have totaled an astonishing $370 billion in today’s money. That figure, incidentally, is
straight from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
So if we have to compensate them when there’s a “trade war,” why did we have to compensate them when there isn’t one? And are we going to compensate everyone else too? Should the rest of us get federal credits when we buy a new iPhone?
No wonder Gladstone Land
LAND, +3.09%, a Virginia-based publicly traded farmland real estate investment trust, has actually risen during the past month — even while the rest of the stock market has slumped.
So much for the alleged trouble in “farm country.” The stock, a useful proxy for the farming industry, is up 45% including dividends since Donald Trump was elected.
The S&P 500: Just 30%.
Who should be subsidizing whom here?
Brett Arends is a MarketWatch columnist.
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