As the trade war limps along exactly as you’d expect a policy launched by a failed casino owner would, real people are taking it on the chin.
One of those folks is a farmer from a reliably red state that voted for Trump by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
Yahoo! Finance:
“This trade thing is what’s brought on by the president and it’s really frustrating because he took away all of our markets,” Bob Kuylen, a farmer from North Dakota who grows spring wheat and sunflowers, told Yahoo Finance. “We live in an area where we’re kind of in the middle of nowhere. It costs us a lot of money — over $1 a bushel to get our grain to markets.”
Hmm, the carnival skipped town months ago and our farmers are just now realizing that the magic beans they bought were just regular beans — and, worse, China doesn’t want them anymore.
And losing customers has become a major issue. Soybean farmers have been dealing with this, as China has turned to other countries like Brazil for soybeans. Kuylen said this is also happening for wheat farmers, as China has begun importing wheat from Russian regions.
“All these countries went to different countries to get their grain,” Kuylen said. “How are we going to get the relations back with them to buy our grain again and be our customers?”
How? Well, step one is firing Donald Trump. Step two is hoping it’s not too late. Step three is learning your lesson and never doing anything so foolish again.
Meanwhile, Kuylen says he’s losing $70 an acre just by putting a crop in the ground, and he acknowledges it will be a “scary situation” if the trade war doesn’t end soon.
He added: “We kind of get a bad picture that we’re all big money and drive all this big equipment. In reality … these are record low incomes for farmers in the last couple of years. It’s getting tough out there. We’re going to start seeing a lot of suicide and a lot of farmers going out of business. So, that’s not a good thing.”
Remember, one man — and one man only — is to blame for these vanished markets. And his fairytale solutions look less and less magical by the day.
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