Summary
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that Trump’s mass deportation policy could lead to labor shortages and higher grocery prices.
Experts say agriculture, construction, and healthcare will be hardest hit, with farm output losses estimated between $30 and $60 billion.
Deportations could cost the U.S. economy up to $88 billion annually.
AOC argued that immigrant labor is vital to economic stability, urging Congress to pursue immigration reform.
Farms are just going to take it on the chin. They’re losing their labor with the mass deportations and they’re losing a hilariously large buyer of food with USAID being shut down.
So who’s ready for the new price on food?
And they’ll blame Democrats. And the Democratic Party won’t combat the misinformation because they suck at messaging.
IMHO, Democrats have gotten much better with their messaging over the past decade. People just don’t pay attention because diligently solving problems with substantial plans that take years to show effects isn’t sexy or exciting.
I stay pretty keyed in to what’s going on in congress, but I have to put effort into that. It seems like all the algorithms constantly want to shift my content to paying attention to all the crazy shit the GOP is up to and I’m constantly catching and stopping myself from getting sucked into rage porn.
Saying they’re good at messaging and then saying people don’t paying attention enough to see it is an oxymoron. If they were good at messaging you wouldn’t have to pay attention to see it.
I disagree. They’re not responsible for the lack of media coverage. If all you watch is legacy media, you’re not going to see democratic messaging.
If there are voters that are only watching legacy media then any approach that doesn’t include legacy media is nothing short of negligent.
How do you propose democratic politicians make legacy media cover their messaging? Can you explain how politicians having no control over legacy media companies is negligence? I’m not following the logic on that one…
If it’s my job to make sure the Dam keeps working and the Dam breaks, I’m responsible. I don’t get to say “Well I didn’t know about the cracks I’m only a manager.”. As a professional you can’t just dismiss responsibility. You have to be proficient. If I hire someone who claims to be an expert, and they break things, they can be sued.
It’s the Democrats job to get elected. They will need to make sure their message makes it to average Americans. Since they failed to do this, they’ve failed to do their job. They’re incompetent and guilty of gross negligence.
Your “Best Effort” is meaningless in the real world. Results speak for themselves and the Dems are losers.
Reminder, losing a large purchasing segment decreases demand, which lowers prices until the market adjusts. I.e., it frees up agricultural output that they have to sell, which they’ll lower prices to make sell to other buyers (domestically or internationally).
The distributors will lower prices. Farmers will get paid pennies for what would be dollars. Farmers don’t sell their product directly. They get screwed before the consumer gets screwed. In this kind of a cycle prices drop in the short term, but as farmers can’t afford to plant as much going forward, there’s a supply crunch next season. The government used to do a lot to manage this cycle and smooth it out, by literally buying product.
No big deal in the long term though right? Well except we don’t have a competitive distributor or grocery market anymore. So when that crunch hits those prices are going up and they’re going to stay up. For reference check the recent greedflation that happened.
Worse there is a real risk of a dust bowl effect. Farmers who are strapped for cash don’t want to spend money setting their fields up to fallow properly. So the summer hits and the crops that are planted get buried in all that dust. Making the supply crunch even worse.
Then in a normal situation we’d still have the global supply chain to fall back on. But there’s a very good chance that food is going to have tariffs on it.
Farming isn’t like making a widget in a factory.
I’m not sure what your main point is here. I was responding to you grouping together a labor shortage and a demand shock as - from what it sounded like - a reason to expect high prices. But demand shocks lower prices on the consumer side of food production, as opposed to raising them, because the food at that point exists, and whoever has it needs to sell it, more desperately than they were before.
My main point is this is well beyond the supply/demand chart you get in Econ 101. That more applies to distributors and grocers than it does to farmers. In most places the farmers aren’t in control of the price. The distributors are. This is how you get things like Dairy Farmers disposing of literal tons of milk. It was more expensive to send it than they would have been paid for it. In other words the price dropped so low it wasn’t worth selling it.
Of course that has knock on effects. That farm doesn’t magically get more money next year so their operations are constrained. Grain is worse than Dairy because it can be siloed for literal years. That means the glut will take years to resolve. Years with low or no income for grain farmers.
Are you seeing the problem yet?
No, I’m still not really sure what you’re trying to say. Your original post was about the price to consumers.
And as for the relationship between farmers and distributors, that really depends on the specifics of the purchasing agreements they enter into.
Dude I’m not going to start repeating myself. You have the chain of events that causes higher consumer prices, you just don’t want to admit it’s likely unless the government steps in to prevent it.
If that’s what you were saying re: USAID cancellation eventually raising food prices, you have quite a few leaps of logic in there.