Farmers got welcome news when a USDA report showed income projections would not be as bad as first thought. The seafood industry hopes for positive news in the next Farm Bill. And promised benefits from the Trump tax cuts didn’t deliver, according to a think tank’s research.
Smaller Fall
A negative is still a negative. But a new projection from the USDA shows that the decline in farm income for 2024 isn’t as steep as it initially predicted. Earlier this year, the USDA expected net farm income to drop 22% this year, which could be the largest ever.
But this month, the USDA’s revised forecast calls for a 4.4% net farm income dip. One way to look at the change is that livestock will carry commodities.
Animal receipts will be better than originally expected, according to the new USDA estimate. That will help offset the lower commodity prices. Another factor that could go in farmers’ favor is the cost of inputs. Fertilizer and fuel prices are expected to drop 1%, according to the USDA projections.
The Malvern Daily Record in Hot Spring County, Arkansas, included analysis by a University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture leader on the latest USDA farm income forecast.
A Bigger Catch
Those who fish for a living in Massachusetts see a future in the waters and hope in the Farm Bill. Nearly two-thirds of the seafood in the United States is imported. The country’s seafood industry hopes to expand its catch and is optimistic that a new Farm Bill could provide additional support to expand the industry.
Federal nutrition programs would include a higher amount of domestic seafood, according to the framework of the proposed Farm Bill. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture would also get a special seafood liaison.
Public News Service talked to the CEO of the Cape Cod Fishermen’s Alliance about the potential of the new Farm Bill and what it could mean for the seafood industry.
Not Trickling Down
If you weren’t already wealthy or didn’t own big corporations (of course, that would probably make you wealthy), then you may have hoped that the 2017 federal tax cuts would end up getting you a nice pay raise. Maybe you thought the extra money would give you that seed money to invest in farmland and watch that appreciation grow.
But analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center found that didn’t happen the way that you were promised.
Corporate tax rates under former president Donald Trump’s plan declined from 35% to 21%, a substantial savings for bigger companies, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
That included tax savings for Verizon ($11 billion), Walmart ($9 billion), AT&T ($8 billion), Meta, formerly Facebook ($8 billion).
Trump had said that workers would see a $4,000 pay raise. However, the increase in real median wages only grew 0.09% faster in the two years after the law went into effect compared to the previous two years, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center analysis.
A study earlier this year from researchers at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and the U.S. Treasury Department also found that the tax cuts failed to materialize into the higher wages for workers like Trump had promised. That study found an average wage gain of $750 rather than $4,000.
