Everyone Seems To Wonder What It's Like Down Here

I made the long drive to the town where I grew up in the Dakotas yesterday, and we’re here for a while.

The blizzard of 100-day stories about Trump and how tariffs are going to decimate his supporters seem to think that adjustments aren’t possible. I’d like to direct your attention to this:

This isn’t the most complicated gas pump I’ve seen, but it’s representative. The upper plains red state economies are built on subsidies like those for ethanol, which at best produces a slight bit more energy than what’s used to farm it. The Dakotas get around $1,000 more per person back from the federal government than they pay in — a billion total for South Dakota and $741 million for North Dakota.

So, when soybeans and other crops crater, the next budget reconciliation bill will have a big boost in farm subsidies so the millionaire farmers out here can still fly their Trump flags. (The farm/ranch economy is no longer built on family farms, and hasn’t been for at least a generation — it’s either corporations or big operators who’ve bought up smaller farms.)

I’ll write more about the impact of losing Medicaid (spoiler: not as clear as you’d think), but I don’t expect tariffs to do much to change attitudes out here.