Copy of Sentinel V22 #35-Trump Team Keeps On Running
- Steve Dittmer
- Jul 22
- 5 min read
Trade, Diplomacy, Tax Bills, World Travel, Health Care
Steve Dittmer | AFF Sentinel
Colorado Springs, CO
Originally sent to subscribers 05/13/25
We haven’t even reached the middle of the month and President Trump is wearing people out. Most of us have read about, but never owned, that horse that could settle into a lope and go for miles. Trump must have a bunch of them on his team.
Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, India-Pakistan, dozens of trade supplicants, the reconciliation bill, rescission bills, the Pope’s funeral, a trip to several nations in the Middle East, kicking the pharmaceutical giants in the teeth; looking a gift plane in the mouth and who knows what else.
And Trump is enjoying being the proverbial bull in the china shop. Mrs. Woody Hayes used to move out of the house when summer football practice began. Woody had a one-track mind. Trump is different. Melania must be missing the “fun” Donald when she’s in New York watching Baron at NYU.
It is all too rare for all the segments of the beef production chain to be making money at the same time. The packers haven’t been suffering this much for this long in quite some time. For cattlemen, whether cow/calf or feedlot operator, this is their time with leverage. Any player in the marketplace understands leverage. Trump understands it and appears to be using it to good use in the global marketplace.
The industry’s biggest short-term problems are renewal of packing plant registrations to export beef to China and battling those stubborn Englishmen on growth promotants. Monday provided precious little info on them. But we’re not counting out the Trump team on either score.
Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins is in the UK now.
The China negotiations have been fleshed out in general, dropping tariffs on incoming China products to 30 percent (added to previous tariffs) and our exports to China at ten percent. The two negotiating teams have agreed on a process for handling further formal trade talks while holding the huge tariffs off for 90 days.
The naysayers didn’t think China would even come to the negotiating table for months but reality can bite even the CCP. We are far and away the biggest customer of a nation whose economy is built on exporting. Even imperious dictators have to maintain control of the situation. And as one sage commentator said last week, dictators and communists love the military because they are the one sector of the population who does what they are told. If you control the military, which President Xi may or may not, according to observers.
So, representatives of the two biggest economies in the world are talking, are weighing realities against wants. We don’t trust China, based on their past trade behavior and China knows Trump’s team are neither stupid nor weak.
Some have suggested the “pause” -- if you will -- was suggestive of the U.S. blinking, not China. After all, it was the gargantuan tariffs that brought China to the table. On the other hand, it’s also been suggested that the U.S. is playing a good cop, bad cop routine, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent the good cop and Trump the bad cop, ratcheting tariff rates back up if serious progress is not made, John Carney reports.
USTR Jamieson Greer specifically addressed that mechanism. If China doesn’t live up to agreements, including lifting rare earth mineral and magnet restrictions it implemented after April 2, the tariffs would be raised again. With the old tariffs and the 30 percent reciprocals, the tariffs now are over 50 percent. But there is a lot yet to be negotiated.
It was enough to make one wonder what the Chinese were up to when they admitted last weekend that they didn’t worry about living up to the Phase One deal of Trump 1 because they knew they could buffalo Biden’s administration with impunity.
We are so fortunate that they bought lots of our product. And, no one has figured out how to reverse engineer, steal the intellectual property or force a technical transfer of the beef animal by analyzing a steak in the lab.
Ninety days is not a lot of time to negotiate with the inscrutable and canny Chinese. But even 60 days can build a lot of steam in the pressure cooker that is hundreds of millions of unhappy citizens and millions of out-of-work, hungry and angry Chinese people.
On the other hand, China’s Xi gave a speech at a meeting of 30 South American and Caribbean nations with a number of veiled references to the U.S. as a disruptor of unity, international cooperation and trade. He also announced several efforts to add to the CCP’s Belt and Road initiative in the region. But a number of countries have soured on participating in the Belt and Road program, finding difficulties with Chinese control and paying for the infrastructures the CCP installed.
On the Washington front, the House released a more detailed version of the tax portion of the reconciliation bill, if 389 pages provides enough space. Key provisions include a compromise increase from $10,000 to $30,000 for the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, phased down with income increases; removal of taxes on tip and overtime income (expiring in 2028); some tax deductions for car loan interest and making the current personal income tax brackets permanent.
In D.C. news, the ag committees are wrestling with changes to the SNAP programs to save money. The states, not surprisingly, are resisting moves to shift any costs to them. One proposal discussed basing states’ increasing share of costs on their percentage of erroneous payments. For instance, Hawaii’s percentage of payment errors is double the national average. But its representative complained that with USDA staffing cuts and a changing program, it is a lousy time to institute such a move.
The Medicaid program is the biggest problem. Congress expanded Medicare by adding millions of Obamacare people, by paying for healthy adult people to be added into the program with 90 percent of the cost paid by the federal government. The states figured out how to game that system pretty quick. Medicaid, which was supposed to be a safety net for the poor and disabled, has become a program of huge proportions, sucking money away from the program it was designed for and providing a free ride for able, working age adults.
A Wall Street Journal story pointed out that nearly 50 percent of New York City residents and 40 percent of California state residents are on Medicaid.
That was not the original design.
By the way, for the umpteenth time, we must repeat that cutting tax rates always increases receipts to the federal government. The left and the media keep portraying the spending cuts as only necessary to “offset” or “enable” the tax rate cuts, i.e. for billionaires like you and me. After all, the bottom half of the population pays little or no tax, the top one percent pays over 40 percent and the 2017 tax cuts mostly benefitted lower and middle income earners.
Our address: Agribusiness Freedom Foundation, P.O. Box 88179, Colorado Springs, CO. 80908.
To support the work of AFF, you can contribute with any major credit cards here:
Or,
If you wish to use your Paypal acct. click below: