They said they were coming for the forgotten farmer. Turns out they meant a 50% tax on the goddamn grocery bill.
Trump signed a tariff order last week hitting $20 billion in Canadian goods. Called Canada’s dairy system “unreasonable.” Said American farmers need fair access. Said he was standing up for the heartland.
Bullshit.
U.S. dairy production is at record highs. American farmers already sold $1.3 billion in dairy to Canada last year — Canada is one of our biggest customers. The problem is not that American dairy can’t compete. The problem is the family dairy farm is already dead in most of rural America because massive consolidation ate it alive, and not a single person in Washington did a damn thing about it.
Wisconsin lost two-thirds of its dairy farms in twenty years. Adams County used to have working dairy operations. Now you’re lucky if the barn is still standing. That wasn’t Canada’s fault. That was the farmgate price, the mega-dairy, and the Wall Street money that bought the land when the family went broke.
So what does the tariff actually do? It doesn’t reopen a shuttered barn. It doesn’t lower the price of a gallon of milk. It raises the cost of everything Canadian that flows into American factories, construction sites, and stores — lumber, auto parts, manufacturing inputs. The bill lands on the same working families already getting crushed.
The donor-class dairy operations that would actually benefit from wider Canadian market access are the same ones that killed the family farm in the first place. The tariff is a campaign prop dressed in a flag. The farmer got the speech. The consumer got the invoice.
Family values, my ass. A tariff you refuse to explain is a tax you hope nobody reads.
Source story: Trump singles out Canada’s dairy system as tariff justification.