This is not to suggest that there is no need in rural America for investment, reform and assistance. Many farm communities are hurting, but very few federal dollars go to the small to midsize farmers who actually need assistance. About 75 percent of total subsidy payments go to the largest 10 percent of farming companies. Agribusiness monopolies eat away at farmers’ profit, from the seeds they grow to the chemicals they buy to the supply chain that gets their product to market. Tens of thousands of farms have gone under in recent years, and farmer suicides are alarmingly high. The opioid crisis is as intense in farm country as it is in other geographic areas, and many parts of rural America are plagued with the same “food deserts” that plague many urban neighborhoods.

Mr. Perdue isn’t wrong when he says that the American dream does not consist of government dependency. But utter self-sufficiency is, if we are honest, impossible for most of us. People will always need a “safety net” of sorts — but ideally, we should want people to find that support in community, family, churches and associations, as well as other local ties, not (or at least not only) through a distant government bureaucracy.

That said, at a time when many local social threads have broken, and our society is increasingly fragmented and frayed, there is a need for the government to provide support where no other support is available.

Mr. Perdue and others in Washington assume that stringent work requirements will push food stamp recipients to find the number of working hours necessary for eligibility. They suggest, without saying so explicitly, that any unemployment currently experienced by these beneficiaries is because of laziness, not lack of opportunity.

But many people in both rural and urban areas of America know that reality is a lot messier than this. Available work is not distributed evenly over every state or region. Threatening to take away someone’s food stamps until they find steady work does nothing to solve the problems of postindustrial collapse, community breakdown, economic inequality, racism, systemic poverty, homelessness or drug addiction that have prompted many to find help in the first place — just as a farm bailout does nothing to repair the economic, cultural and political conditions that are feeding our current farm crisis.

But as farmers’ plight has grown, they’ve been offered the “indefinitely giving hand” that Mr. Perdue does not want food stamp recipients to receive. It seems hypocritical to demand that the poorest Americans pull themselves up by their bootstraps while covering the business risk of the nation’s wealthiest agribusinesses.

So if Mr. Perdue and the Trump administration want to foster fiscal self-sufficiency, perhaps — rather than starting with Americans struggling to put food on their table — they should start at the top of the food chain instead.

Gracy Olmstead (@gracyolmstead) is a writer who contributes to The American Conservative, The Week, The Washington Post and other publications.

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