Farmers pay record $6.50 diesel and milk tariffs, the latest invoice on a war Pentagon still can't total.
"Farmers first" died this month at the age of one campaign, and the notices keep arriving late, the way they do for a name nobody wants to be the one to strike from the letterhead. The early obituary ran the promise's survivors in North Carolina, a grower who called it a bill of goods. Then the Congressional Budget Office put a number on the separate war eating the same budget — nearly $40 billion, the office called that figure conservative, meaning the real one is bigger and nobody in government will say by how much. A senator who voted to confirm the man running that war has since called for his firing twice. A congressman has filed paperwork to impeach him. None of that is malarkey; it is the public record, dated and signed.
This week the bill widened rather than closed. On September 8th Canada's retaliatory tariffs took effect on some 700 American products, milk and cream and agricultural equipment among them — the "dollar for dollar" kind, the government called it, fifteen to fifty percent, aimed at the same farms the earlier promise was named for. Twelve days later, on the 20th, CBS News reported the harvest itself in trouble: trade wars, tariffs, inflation, all taking their toll, and diesel — the fuel that runs the combine, the truck, the grain dryer — hit a record $6.50 a gallon, nearly a dollar higher than the month before.
Nobody billed that dollar to a line item called "war." It shows up instead in the price of getting a crop to a buyer who is now taxed for buying it. The farmer does not choose which invoice to pay first. The diesel and the tariff and the deficit arrive together, addressed to the same address, and the men who could put a final number on any of it — the Pentagon's own briefers, under oath, before frustrated senators — still haven't.
"Farmers First" is survived now not by one grower but by an entire harvest, nationwide, paying the freight on somebody else's math. No institution mourns it; institutions rarely mourn what they've stopped funding. The promise is dead. The invoice is not.
In lieu of flowers, ask your member of Congress for the actual number — the tariff bill, the fuel bill, the war bill — added, not estimated, and sent to the people currently paying it.