Vice President Kamala Harris bears the blame for high prices and declining farm income, said Indiana farmer Kip Tom on Monday, pushing for the reelection of Donald Trump as president. On the contrary, said Harris advocate Rod Snyder, calling the Nov. 5 election “a choice between certainty and chaos,” like the Sino-U.S. trade war that cost farmers billions of dollars in lost export sales.
“His [Trump’s] most recent proposal of 10 to 20 percent across-the-board tariffs for all imported products would lead to further loss of global market share for U.S. agriculture, not to mention rapid inflation for consumers,” said Snyder during a two-hour discussion of the agricultural platforms of the presidential candidates. Trump has said tariffs could be as high as 60 percent on Chinese products.
“We have collapsing farm incomes, we’ve got a growing trade deficit, we have tax policies which are a threat to our industry,” said Tom. And if Trump’s tariffs disrupt the farm economy, “he’ll take care of us this time too,” said Tom, referring to USDA payments of $23 billion to farmers in 2018 and 2019 to offset the impact of the trade war with China.
Tom, U.S. food ambassador in Rome during the Trump years, and Snyder, former EPA agriculture adviser for the Biden administration, spoke for themselves and not as campaign representatives during the session organized by the Farm Foundation. Each relied on his experience as an administration official and his understanding of the candidates’ positions.
Harris has been part of large federal investments in clean rural energy, high-speed internet access, and the climate-smart initiative to develop markets for sustainable agriculture products, said Snyder. By contrast, Trump has pledged mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, which could include many farmworkers, and high tariffs that would provoke retaliation by trading partners.
“I think it’s important to acknowledge that the farm economy is in a down cycle, which all of us should be concerned about,” said Snyder. “However, in terms of policies being advanced by Donald Trump, in my opinion, the cure is worse than the disease.”
Trump has a better record than Harris on trade policy, said Tom, describing the Sino-U.S. trade war as a U.S. victory that resulted in larger exports to China. “Donald Trump is clearly the leader in making sure that we have a strong ag economy and make sure we can continue to export our excess here in this country,” he said.
In his first days in office, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations and threatened to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which eventually was modernized as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Mexico and Canada supplanted China as the top markets for U.S. food and ag exports in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30.
China “is our largest existential threat,” said Tom. The farm economy has sunk “almost to a 1980s farm crisis,” he said. The USDA estimates net farm income, a measure of profitability, will fall for the second year in a row this year but also would be the fourth-highest on record.
Twice as many farmers would face estate taxes under Harris’s proposals than now face liabilities, said Tom. “It could be the most undermining issue.” Snyder said the estate taxes reaches only a few farmers now.
At present, the estate tax exemption is $13.6 million per person with a 40 percent tax on amounts above that level. The exemption would drop to $5 million per person in 2026 with the expiration of the Trump tax cuts. Harris would reduce the exemption to $3.5 million and increase the tax rate to at least 55 percent and introduce a 10 percent surtax on estates worth more than $1 billion, according to an analysis by a Chicago-area law firm.