It does not have to be the military. It is about an emergency. Covid cost a lot of people their jobs. Otherwise they would have been able to keep up with paying their loans.
But let us look at other times of emergency.
Like when this happened during Trump:
Government payments to farmers have surged to historic levels under President Donald Trump as the Agriculture Department floods the industry with cash to stem the financial losses from Trump’s tariff fights and the coronavirus pandemic.
But as agriculture grows more reliant on unprecedented taxpayer support, farm policy experts and watchdog groups warn the subsidies are growing too big and too fast, with no strings attached and little oversight from Congress — and that Washington could have a difficult time shutting off the spigot.
Direct farm aid has climbed each year of Trump’s presidency, from $11.5 billion in 2017 to more than $32 billion this year — an all-time high, with potentially far more funding still to come in 2020, amounting to about two-thirds of the cost of the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development and more than the Agriculture Department’s $24 billion discretionary budget, according to a POLITICO analysis. But lawmakers have taken a largely hands-off approach, letting the department decide who gets the money and how much.
The massive payments have been a political boon to Trump in farm country — he tweeted in January that he hoped the money would be “the thing they will most remember” — but risk creating a culture of dependency, as farmers and ranchers work the bonus subsidies into their financial plans when making large, up-front investments in seed, feed and farm machinery.
“It’s a big problem for agriculture because it’s not sustainable,” said Anne Schechinger, senior economics analyst at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit watchdog organization. “It’s really difficult once you’re giving farmers this much money to then take away those [payments].”
The president was already spending double his predecessor to spare farmers the cost of his trade war. Now the price is reaching unsustainable levels.
www.politico.com