The reconciliation bill has been a hot-button topic for agricultural America this week, and South Dakota Senator John Thune, Arkansas Senator John Boozman and American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) President Zippy Duvall dropped in on AgriTalk to share their views with Host Chip Flory.
Thune says the effects of the bill as it currently stands will be felt across more than large corporations.
“These taxes are going to be passed on. They’ll argue we’re just taxing the rich, we’re just taxing businesses and we’re just taxing big corporations. I think the people who will get hurt by this are consumers, workers, families and business because we’re talking about $3.5 trillion, which is a huge amount of tax increase, and nobody is going to be spared,” says Thune.
Agricultural America, as Thune puts it, will experience a great deal of these negative effects.
“We’ve been fighting hard against some of the ideas that are out there that would really adversely impact agriculture. But this is just bad news and there is no good way to raise $3.5 trillion without hurting a lot of people,” says Thune.
Senator Boozman says that agriculture is not about Republicans and Democrats, rather the regions of the country and the commodities they grow. He says in the past, members from each party would generally seek input from commodity groups when working on a bill of this nature, but that was not the case this time around.
“When you look back over the last 40 years, we’ve had several reconciliation packages, several entities like this. This is the first time there has been no input from one of the parties. There has been no input at all from republicans and no input from stakeholders; no amendments to this bill,” says Boozman. “I’m very upset about it and your listeners are upset because this is strictly coming from the Biden Administration.”
As a country, he says, we expect our governmental parties to work together to agree on legislature that is for the betterment of all. Agriculture falls short in the reconciliation bill as a result of divided parties.
“My concern is the senate. We’re seeing one side of the administration can unilaterally, without any input from anyone, come back and rewrite the farm bill, which they’re doing again. Now, all that’s being thrown out the window,” says Boozman.
AFBF President Duvall seconds Senator Boozman’s notion that the House Ag Committee is working in a partisan manner.
“Normally, on the House Ag Committee or the Senate Ag Committee, you see more bipartisan working relationships and efforts going on. Unfortunately, in this day and time, everything is partisan, and we do have a serious problem with the process,” says Duvall. “The process should be dealt with on both sides of the aisle; our country depends on us to be able to sit down and come up with solutions from both sides of the isle.”
For more on the reconciliation bill, click here.
