Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Special Interests
“Mother Nature Always Bats Last”
Posted on July 24, 2019
Call it what you will—coincidence, chance or just bad luck—but on the very day that President Donald J. Trump defended his Administration’s almost indefensible record on the environment, the Washington, D. C. metro area was deluged by rainfall not seen since Noah.
In fact, so much rain fell so fast on the nation’s capital […]
The Bum’s Rush, USDA Style
Posted on July 10, 2019
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue doesn’t need to hit the road this summer to find more than enough messy problems to keep him busy through harvest.
There’s the Chinese trade mess, the NAFTA 2.0 trade mess, the European Union trade mess, and the Japanese trade mess.
Also, there’s the mess Mother Nature made […]
“It Was Like Watching a Train Wreck Happen”
Posted on May 30, 2019
No one I know has ever witnessed a train wreck as it happened. As such, when a friend or colleague says or writes that an event “was like watching a train wreck happen,” I’m pretty sure it wasn’t like watching a train wreck happen.
Until Sunday, May 5, that is, when President Donald J. Twitter […]
Paying Taxes Like a General, or, Better Yet, Amazon
Posted on May 30, 2019
Decades ago, when discussing the complexity of U.S. tax code, an ag lobbyist friend noted that all he wanted in any tax reform “was to pay the same taxes the generals paid: General Mills, General Motors, General Dynamics…”
He’d still take that deal. In 2018, General Dynamics had an effective tax rate of 17.8 […]
Ethanol’s Tightening Tough Spot
Posted on May 8, 2019
If you want to anger almost any American farmer, write something less than flattering about the declining use of biofuels—especially ethanol—in the U.S. today.
If you want to really anger almost any American farmer, write something unflattering about biofuels—especially ethanol—that includes the sentence, “U.S. farmers, particularly cornbelt farmers, have gotten a really bad deal from the […]
“No problem, I’ll just stop eating pork.”
Posted on April 24, 2019
One tried-and-true tool politicians use to deflect public criticism is as old as politics itself: beat up the press.
Someone in Secretary Sonny Perdue’s U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) thought it was time to do just that April 8 as the “FSIS Office of Congressional and Public Affairs”—USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service—issued a blistering […]
Unlocking the Rural Economy Requires Different Keys
Posted on April 10, 2019
Of all the places you’d expect to see a fight between the cold, hard face of ag economics and the warm, tender heart of rural America, that place would not be the corner of West 41st St. and Eighth Avenue in New York City, the home of the New York Times.
And yet there it was in […]
Corporations Have Rights; Why Not a Lake?
Posted on April 10, 2019
If the ballot box is the ultimate source of power in the United States, then voters in Toledo, Ohio, used that power Feb. 26 to create what’s now being called a “Bill of Rights” for their wide, blue neighbor, Lake Erie.
That vote, if it withstands court challenges (one was filed immediately after the referendum […]
In the Long Run It’s, Well, a Long Run
Posted on March 14, 2019
One of the oldest theoretical constructions in economics declares that in a perfect market, short term profits and losses eventually even out so that, in the long term, all profits are zero.
Famed 20th century English economist John Maynard Keynes gets credit for restating this jargon-rich theory into clear, concise language when, in 1923, he wrote, […]
Knives, Forks, and Farmers Favor Immigration Reform
Posted on February 21, 2019
When Internal Revenue Service (IRS) workers returned to their jobs Jan. 28 after the recent, 35-day government shutdown, an estimated five million pieces of unopened mail awaited.
Equally daunting, the shutdown coincided with the IRS’s hiring of its annual army of temporary workers to process the impending tax season’s mail. The delay now leaves the […]
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Powerful essay that asks the right questions at the right time for every nation of the world and every citizen of the world. Please read. https://t.co/Rez62IJHDY
Rural hospitals are dying before our eyes & once gone, they’re gone forever. Congress: can you spare $100B for America’s rural healthcare system before giving foreign-flagged cruise lines one US taxpayer nickel? Please read this well reported story. https://t.co/3R2WDqJis1
Work from facts. Here’s a good starting point for week of March 23. https://t.co/jDdCCFF1dL