Farm & Food File: Follow the money to the one-tenth of 1%

Lost in the breathless reporting on the huge federal budget cuts and even more massive federal tax cuts just passed by the heel-clicking Congress was a report on just how rich America’s mega-rich now are.

The answer is unfathomably, head-shakingly rich. In 2024 alone, for example, the top 10 richest Americans made $365 billion, or $1 billion a day, according to Oxfam, a global nonprofit that fights poverty and inequality.

To give an idea of how much those single-year earnings are, Oxfam calculated it would require 10 U.S. workers earning an average $50,000 a year to work a collective 726,000 years to earn the same amount as the top 10 did in 2024.

And yet this solid-gold 10 just got a big, beautiful tax cut courtesy of the Trump White House and congressional Republicans that, roughly calculated, would have saved them $7.3 billion in 2024 earnings had it been made retroactive — and, of course, they paid taxes.

By contrast, when the new tax law fully bites — well, after the 2026 and 2028 elections, as designed by Republicans — the bottom 10% of U.S. workers will see their “household resources … drop by 4% in 2033,” according to the Congressional Budget Office.

This widening economic split isn’t just between a handful of politically-connected billionaires and the tens of millions politically-unconnected Americans whose Medicaid and SNAP subsidies will now be used to further feather Big Money’s already down-filled nest.

Big Ag also did well in the big, beautiful budget deal while small ag was passed over.

For example, according to the Environmental Working Group, the budget bill’s newly raised payment limits on many of today’s generous federal farm programs will benefit few big farms far more than the many small farms.

“In particular,” EWG notes, “the (budget) bill increases the limit on farm subsidies for certain commodity crops from $125,000 to $155,00. Less than one-tenth of 1% of farmers received more than $125,0000 linked to government price guarantees in 2024 … according to data provided by the Department of Agriculture.”

The same ratio was true in 2023, USDA data proves, while “only two-tenths of 1% received a payment greater than $125,000 in 2022.”

As such, EWG notes, “don’t call it a budget reconciliation bill. Call it a ‘farm bill for one-tenth of the 1%’”

Moreover, the reconciliation bill also allows a costly, 30-million-acre “increase (in) the number of base acres eligible for farm program payments.”

That 11% boost in acres, according to Gary Schnitkey, an ag economist with the farmdocDAILY team at the University of Illinois, mostly benefits three Southern crops — rice, cotton and peanuts — and raises the cost of farm programs another 11%.

Ferd Hoefner, a long-time Capitol Hill ag policy expert, was more blunt in his assessment of this expansion of program acres in a June 25 briefing facilitated by the EWG.

He asked: Why should 14,000 cotton farmers, 4,900 peanut farmers and 12,000 rice farmers get most of this benefit?

Hoefner’s broad answer focuses on the sum of big farm-favoring changes in the bill: “It puts an end to the idea that we have a ‘farm safety net,’” he noted.

In short, no one in American agriculture should keep a straight face when claiming the nearly $70 billion farm bill will help rural America when the top 1% of farm program recipients garner 25% of all payments and the top 10% receive 70%.

And now they’ll do it while cutting federal food assistance and government-backed medical care — by more than $1 trillion — to pay for these rising, narrowly-focused subsidies.