John Block Reports from Washington

Hello everybody out there in farm country. This radio commentary is brought to you by the National Corn Growers Association, CropLife America, and Renewable Fuels Association. They are all friends, supporters, and allies of a healthy farm economy and prosperous rural America. Thank you.

And now today’s commentary-

I can hardly believe it. It’s December. Christmas is coming and then the New Year. Now I am grateful for a good crop this year and the prices are the best we have seen since 2012. That was a drought year. Over the years farmers have learned to not go crazy with optimism because we don’t know what lies ahead. We are already living with extreme increases in our cost of doing business- fertilizer, chemicals, fuel, machinery, labor production and expenses are all up.

I want to put an issue on the table that I haven’t talked much about. But it is in the paper and on
the news every day. Mostly in the big cities, organized retail theft is in the headlines. An
organized group of 20 or 30 individuals smashed windows, stole all kinds of merchandise from
Best Buy in Minneapolis. A San Francisco store was looted of more than $1 million worth of
property. Chicago stores were also sacked. What is going on? Are the city police being held back
from doing their job? Perhaps we just don’t have enough police because they have been
defunded. California has in place a law that if the thieves only steal $900 worth of merchandise,
they probably can get away with that. That’s not happening in rural America, and I pray it
doesn’t.

Our federal government has some very serious challenges. Last October 1st Congress passed a Continuing Resolution providing the money to fund our government until this Friday. After this Friday our government will shut down unless Congress acts. They could pass another Continuing Resolution extending funding into the spring. If Congress cannot agree to raise the debt limit before we run out of money, we won’t be able to pay the bills. Our government has gone through this before, and we survived. But with the bitter political conflicts today, who knows. Guess we’ll just wait and see. With so much uncertainty we still want to be happy.

I will close with some advice from Arthur Brooks of Harvard. “A lot of our happiness is out of
our control. But some of it, we can control. It requires that we invest in 4 things. They are- faith,
family, friends and work in which we earn our success and serve others.” In these difficult times
that’s pretty good advice.

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