“American farmers are having a tough year, in no small part because of President Donald Trump’s trade war. Now, the White House is gearing up to extend them a multi-billion-dollar bailout” at taxpayer expense, reports CNN:
Surging costs and foreign retaliation from tariffs have hurt the US agriculture industry — as have immigration-related labor shortages and plummeting commodity prices. Farm production expenses are estimated to reach $467.4 billion in 2025, according to the Agriculture Department, up $12 billion from last year.
Farm bankruptcies rose in the first half of the year to the highest level since 2021, according to US courts data.
Trump’s policies have exacerbated those woes, from the deportation of the industry’s key migrant workforce to renewed trade tensions between the United States and China. And for traditional American crops, such as soybeans, the situation has grown particularly precarious.
Tariffs have also made U.S. manufacturing shrink for seven straight months. Tariffs have increased the cost of the raw materials needed by our factories. Some countries have imposed retaliatory tariffs and trade restrictions in response to Trump’s tariffs.
Tariffs can wipe out jobs. For example, tariffs on steel wipe out more jobs than they save, because “steel is produced by a tiny sliver of the economy, but used as an input by a much broader swathe of manufacturers,” notes Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan.
Steel and aluminum tariffs have a history of wiping out more jobs than they save, by increasing the cost of production for American industries that use steel and aluminum as raw materials to make their products: The steel and aluminum tariffs Trump imposed back in 2018 shrank employment by 74,000 jobs.
America does not produce enough aluminum to fully supply the industries that use aluminum as a raw material to make their products. Nor does it even have the capacity to produce all the aluminum our industries need as a raw material. So when tariffs increase, these industries have to continue to buy imported aluminum, at a higher price due to the tariffs, in order to make their products. That cost increase from the tariffs makes it harder for factories to expand production of manufactured hoods. That also makes it harder for them to hire more people, and cuts their profitability and their ability to pay their employees higher wages.
