Iowa
Related: About this forumrurallib
(63,228 posts)ewg.org - the environmental working group. It was hard to find old Chuck because his subsidies were tied to his home address in ---- Virginia.
I can't remember what the whole family had gouged us for. It was a good chunk. Plus it was about 2 to 3 years behind time. I guess that is because it takes a while to process applications and payments.
Son Robin works the farm. Grandson Pat (Republican leader in Iowa's house) was in for several thousand. No idea if he actually farms.
Chuckles was far from the only senator abusing the farm subsidies back then. I assume he still isn't.
Good for Franken for bringing this up. Grassley needs to be exposed like he never has been before and it looks like Franken has the chops to stand up to him.
bringthePaine
(1,806 posts)progressoid
(50,757 posts)Still pisses me off. All those pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, fiscal conservative republican farmers didn't bat an eye cashing those checks.
In 2019, the federal government delivered an extraordinary financial aid package to America's farmers. Farm subsidies jumped to their highest level in 14 years, most of them paid out without any action by Congress.
The money flowed to farmers like Robert Henry. When I visited in early July, many of his fields near New Madrid, Mo., had been flooded for months, preventing him from working in them. The soybeans that he did manage to grow had fallen in value; China wasn't buying them, in retaliation for the Trump administration's tariffs.
That's when the government stepped in. Some of the aid came from long-familiar programs. Government-subsidized crop insurance covered some of the losses from flooding. Other payments were unprecedented. The U.S. Department of Agriculture simply sent him a check to compensate him for the low prices resulting from the trade war.
" 'Trump money' is what we call it," Henry said. "It helped a lot. And it's my understanding, they're going to do it again."
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/farmers-got-billions-from-taxpayers-in-2019-and-hardly-anyone-objected
rurallib
(63,228 posts)Obamacare days?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/grassley-ive-lived-off-th_n_376015
Here's a new and weird mental image to add to the health care debate. On C-SPAN Tuesday morning, in a discussion over whether the Senate health care reform bill amounted to socialism, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) acknowledged that he "lived off the public tit" as a congressman.
After Grassley said he didn't think the bill was tantamount to socialism, a viewer called into the program and argued that as a public official Grassley himself was, in some ways, living off the government. Grassley admitted that he was.
GRASSLEY: For the first 16 years I made $3,000 every other year as a state legislator. Now do you expect me to live on $3,000 every other year? No I was a factory worker for 10 years and I was a farmer for that period of time and I farm with my son now. So if you're trying to make a case that I've lived off the public tit all these years, I think you're saying correctly in the years I've been in the Congress but not the years before I came to Congress.