{"id":206202,"date":"2026-04-22T17:14:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T17:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/206202\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T17:14:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T17:14:09","slug":"opinion-fake-farmers-of-america-are-the-real-welfare-queens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/206202\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Fake Farmers of America are the real welfare queens"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Ronald Reagan famously railed hard against supporting the mythical welfare queen<\/a>. He portrayed welfare programs that helped families with dependent children as wasteful, fraudulent and encouraging dependency.<\/p>\n

\"\"Smiley<\/p>\n

But there was a group of people he saw as the embodiment of traditional American values and therefore fit for U.S. welfare \u2013 American farmers. The farmers were portrayed as independent, virtuous, hard-working producers, and Reagan\u2019s rhetoric reinforced this distinction on who does and who does not deserve the benefits of our sympathy.<\/p>\n

It was politically smart for him to do so. The agricultural economy was in collapse and rural states had (and still have) major influence in the Senate and the Electoral College. Proponents argued that farm aid and subsidies would stabilize markets and protect the food supply. American voters agreed, and the resulting Reagan Administration\u2019s agricultural and trade policies were influential and long lasting.<\/p>\n

This romantic idea of the classic American farmer is strong today and endures despite reality then and now. Like the 1980s, the small family farmer is not the dominant economic producer; a small number of farms (4%) produce about two-thirds of the nation\u2019s food.<\/p>\n

Large corporate farms also, with little risk, receive a largely disproportionate amount of farm subsidies, exploiting loopholes and programs systematically engineered for them to do so. This clearly isn\u2019t aligned with American ideals.<\/p>\n

Reagan said, \u201cWe should measure welfare\u2019s success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added,\u201d so we should now wonder if he would call these current and past programs a success. Setting large corporate, welfare queen farms aside, who are today\u2019s small family farmers making up 86% of all US farms<\/a> and only contributing 14\u202f% of total production value<\/a>? Who are these people considered by our government as worthy of our help?<\/p>\n

Meet Farmer Mike in Ohio. He was president of his graduating class 25 years ago. Mike lives with his mom on their 50 acres, 30 of which they lease to a sharecropper for soybeans. Mike\u2019s mom is a retired tax consultant. She surely explained the low $2,500 gross agricultural income requirement for Ohio farming tax benefits that was established in 1974 and has not increased since then. Apparently there is no need for plans of eventual profitability.<\/p>\n

Cattleman Adam is from a legacy farm family in Tennessee. He and his young family live in the original, newly renovated farmhouse, rent-free, on approximately 200 of the family\u2019s acres. Adam received a strong public education at a prestigious public magnet school with many opportunities to complete his education, cost-free, but he dropped out of college at the very end. With no plans to farm the land himself, Adam now works in construction as a concrete estimator. Recently, Adam\u2019s great uncle was prescient enough to put the family farm in a land trust.<\/p>\n

Libertarian Larry is a veteran, a felon, a family man, and a businessman. Transplanted from Indiana, he now runs a real farm in Tennessee. Against every fiber in his being, he got a small business loan, thinking if you can\u2019t beat them, join them. Last spring, DOGE abruptly ended that SBA program. Larry now wonders aloud to his chestnut-fed heirloom pigs if he should have gotten a 9-5 job and just faked it for the tax breaks like everyone else. The real farmers understand Larry\u2019s frustration and disappointment.<\/p>\n

To an objective outsider, could it seem as though we are encouraging dependency?<\/p>\n

Hidden within these 2 million small family farms<\/a> is a bipartisan solution to increase development opportunities that lower the cost of housing and remove the burden on our fellow homeowning taxpayers of our current social welfare queens.<\/p>\n

It is time to revisit and revise the revenue threshold to an amount that encourages people who want to farm and not to just do enough to dodge taxes. We need to better distinguish between hobby farms, tax-motivated landholding, genuine small producers, and good land stewards. Most importantly, we need an updated strategy that encourages and supports real farmers like Larry who run the farm like a business on a genuine intent to make a profit with consistent production, sales, record-keeping, and efforts to improve efficiency over time.<\/p>\n

Like Ronnie said 40 years ago, let\u2019s bring back hard work and economic responsibility. Do we have the courage to hold our neighbors accountable and finally end our system of landed gentry? 250 years later is better than never.<\/p>\n

Jill Smiley lives in Murfreesboro\u00a0with her husband and their children. She is the founder and treasurer of The Volunteer Party, a political action committee focused on local issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Ronald Reagan famously railed hard against supporting the mythical welfare queen. He portrayed welfare programs that helped…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206203,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":{"0":"post-206202","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-queens","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-nyc","11":"tag-queens","12":"tag-queens-headlines","13":"tag-queens-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}