@#6 ... Ask our farmers. ...
Good point.
But then there's this ...
Trump's $12 billion farmer bailout is a Band-Aid on a bigger wound' the American agriculture industry is still reeling from (December 2025)
fortune.com
... President Donald Trump has delivered on his promise to provide aid to U.S. farmers hit by his sweeping tariff policy, but that hasn't freed the agriculture industry from worries of tight margins and volatile markets.
On Monday, Trump, alongside Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, and National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett, announced a $12 billion farm aid program, which outlined much-needed relief for farmers who sounded the alarms about increasing input costs and fewer export opportunities amid ongoing trade tensions. Farmers will begin receiving funds by the end of February, Rollins said.
"Now we're once again in a position where a president is able to put farmers first," Trump said at a Monday roundtable of farmers and lawmakers. "But unfortunately, I'm the only president that does that."
While farmers and agricultural economists see the package as a way to move forward after a disappointing harvest season, they fear the precedent of cash bailouts does not provide systemic solutions to a beleaguered industry, and they don't believe the $12 billion gesture is enough to solve agriculture's deeper challenges.
"We're talking $12 billion, and while it is a lot of money, in the grand scheme of things, it's still going to be a Band-Aid on a bigger wound," Ryan Loy, assistant professor and extension economist for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, told Fortune. "How can we triage this situation right now, work on that longer-term solution? That's really, I think, the overall attitude toward it." ...
www.ebsco.com
A more considered response came in a postelection speech to the Democratic Leadership Council, in which Clinton defended his record. He pointed out he was the first president since Harry Truman to cut the federal budget deficit, which had quadrupled during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Clinton also took credit for promoting free trade, which traditionally has been supported by Republicans, and for his anticrime bill, which provided funds for increasing the size of cities' police forces. Clinton pointed out that he had already reduced the size of the federal government by more than a quarter of a million employees. In other speeches, the president said that although he was willing to cooperate with the Republican Congress, he would not compromise on matters of principle. One such matter was the ban on certain kinds of assault weapons, which was enacted as part of the anticrime bill but which many Republicans wanted to repeal.
When the 104th Congress convened in January, 1995, the Republicans delivered on their promise of a dynamic hundred days. They succeeded in bringing all the major points in their Contract with America to a vote in the House of Representatives, and all but one measure passed there. Many Democrats voted with the Republicans. The one failure was the proposal for a constitutional amendment to mandate a federal balanced budget, which failed to secure the two-thirds majority required for a constitutional amendment. Although many of these proposals faced a much tougher fight in the Senate, it was clear that the Republicans had profoundly shifted the focus of political debate for a long time to come.
Bowing to the immediate reality, Clinton, who had campaigned in part on a promise to "end welfare as we know it," cooperated in 1996 with Republican majorities to produce the nation's first major welfare reform law since the inauguration of President Johnson's Great Society in the 1960's. The reform has been largely credited with reducing poverty and encouraging work among the poor. Moreover, the long-anticipated balanced budget became an actual fact within a few years, as government revenues surged with a healthy economy, generating large reductions in federal debt. For this development, both Clinton and the fiscally conservative Republicans claimed some credit. The Republican majority later successfully impeached Clinton, bringing charges of perjury against him in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but Clinton weathered that storm.