Biden tells potato farmer complaining about overregulation to get job hauling chicken manure

Biden tells potato farmer complaining about overregulation to get job hauling chicken manure
Julie Masser Ballay, Joe Biden (Image: CNN screen grab)

In their more honest moments (which are admittedly few), Democrats acknowledge that their goal is to kill jobs in the name of global warming. One of the best-known examples was Hillary Clinton’s “promise” at a CNN town hall in Ohio in 2016 to “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Sometimes, candidates attempt to finesse their self-serving plans by offering alternative jobs Americans can perform in their brave new world. We saw this in 2017 when Joe Biden, who wouldn’t know a computer program if it fell on him, recommended that displaced coal miners “learn to code.” Adding insult to injury Biden told attendees of a political rally in New Hampshire, “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well. Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”

He was at it again at last night’s much-touted CNN town hall in Moosic, Pa. One of the questioners, who is CFO of her family’s potato farm and a Republican who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, began her question to Biden by noting the burden the Obama administration placed on farms like hers through overregulation. She then asked, “How do you plan to decrease the regulatory burden for farmers and businesses as a whole?”

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Biden’s answer follows, as does a video of the exchange:

Two ways. Number one: Provide for your ability to make a lot more money as farmers by dealing with you being able to put land in land banks and you get paid to do that to provide for more open space and provide for the ability of you to be able to be in a position that we are going to pay you for planting certain crops that in fact absorb carbon from the air. That is part of what the plan relates to in terms of agriculture and the environment. But as it relates to — if you are talking about regulation as it relates to fertilizer and water tables, that’s a different thing. In the United States, in my state of Delaware, we have a $4 billion industry — chickens. And poultry. And all the manure, quite frankly, that is a consequence of chickens and so it is polluting the Chesapeake Bay. What we’ve found out, we invested a lot of money and found out you can pelletize this and take out the methane so you are in a position where you can use that fertilizer without the damage that was being done before. The same way with horse manure and cow manure and pig manure. And we can create thousands of jobs in rural America as a consequence of setting up these small industries within communities. And so that’s the way you’ll be able to continue to farm without worrying about whether or not you’re polluting and being in a position where you’re able to make money by what you do in the transition as well be able to grow more.

It is obvious from the look on the questioner’s face as Biden spoke that he had lost the sale before he began. Did you hear anything in Biden’s prefab answer that remotely addressed the speaker’s question about decreasing the regulatory burden for farmers and businesses? To the degree that Biden mentioned government regulation at all, it was in an admission that there will be more if he is elected.

By the way, Biden mentioned a “number one” at the beginning of his answer, but there was no number two. Come to think of it, I take back. The whole answer was nothing but “number two.”

Ben Bowles

Ben Bowles

Ben Bowles is a freelance writer and regular contributor to "Liberty Unyielding."

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