The Agricultural Adjustment Act also created ethical problems. We remember that this all happened during the Great Depression where unemployment was higher than ever before, and people and their families were starving. The AAA was passed in the middle of the growing season. That means that farmers had already planted their crops and once the AAA was active, the government forced many farmers to plow over their fields. Thousands of pigs were slaughtered under this act as well. This seemed like an inhumane thing to do when all that food was being wasted amidst a starving nation.

Another ethical problem that it caused was a racial issue. In that time there were many black farmers. They too were forced to have their crops regulated by the government. The only problem was that the government seemed to overlook their needs. The only ones that received government subsidies were the white farm owners. The black community seemed to be overlooked altogether. Thousands of black farmers lost their jobs and their land with no real compensation to rely on.

There were also a lot of loopholes in the structure of the AAA. For one, there were many other people involved in farming besides the farm owners. There were sharecroppers, and all the people who worked and ran those farms. They all lost their jobs because there was nothing for them to do. The sharecroppers were supposed to receive subsidies from the government but the problem was that the government only paid the farm owners and it was up to them to give the sharecroppers their share of the money. Unfortunately the farm owner seldom did that.

On top of that, the farmers committed acts of fraud against the AAA. They would legally split up their land among their wives and sons, to receive more money from the government. This of course became a problem.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act caused a lot of problems. It was something that shouldn’t have been passed.

First of all there were the economical issues. There is something called laissez-faire economics. The idea is that an economy will eventually balance itself out naturally if left alone. If there is a surplus somewhere, then eventually it will balance itself out. The AAA completely disregarded this theory that had so far worked for our country and decided that the government knew better than the “invisible hand.” In laissez-faire economics, the problem of having too much food and low food prices would have been solved if things were left alone. Prices are a vital role in economics. They are indicators of when it is a good time to get into a certain market or to get out of it. If left to laissez-faire economics, the farmers would have seen that there was no money in farming and they would have gotten into something different. That would have boosted the demand on food and driven the prices up. Instead, under the AAA, the government paid farmers to stay in an industry that was failing and created an unnecessary dependency on the government to regulate the prices.

Next we should understand that the farmers were being paid by tax money collected from food processors. It was only them that were being taxed, and eventually the AAA was ruled unconstitutional on grounds that a minority was being taxed to benefit another minority. The real problem was that the government paid out more money than it collected from taxes. In the three years that the original AAA was in effect, it put the government in debt for 134 million dollars. Back then, that was a lot more money than it represents today.

Last, after looking at the intentions of the AAA, nothing was accomplished. The price food never went back up until after WWII. By then the depression was over, and no credit can be given to the AAA for ending it.

There are a lot of reasons why the Agricultural Adjustment Act was not a good thing to implement. I have found about 7 different reasons how the AAA caused problems. I have split them up into three different categories: Economical, Ethical, and Loopholes.

First I think I’ll explain a little about what the AAA is. In 1933, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the president of the United States. In that time the country was going through what we know as the Great Depression. The price of food was dropping dramatically and it got to the point where the farmers would loose money by planting and harvesting their crops rather than gain a profit. FDR’s idea was that the food prices needed to go back up, and the only way to do that was to have the government intervene in the economic affairs of the country and regulate the prices. They didn’t want to just set the prices, they wanted to have the prices naturally go up. They came to the conclusion that there was too much food being grown and that if there was less food, it would create a demand which would drive the food prices back up. To do that they paid farmers not to grow their crops. They figured out how much food that there should be, and anything extra that would have been produced, the government signed over one million contracts with different farm owners to pay them not to produce what they thought was extra.

So basically the government paid farmers to not do their job. They called it the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933.

I have decided to do my research paper on the Agricultural Adjustment Act from FDR’s new deal program. I mainly want to do it on this, because for one it is an easy topic to find sources on. The last thing that I want is to have a topic where it is going to be really hard to find information talking about it. The second reason I want to have the AAA as my topic is because politics interest me. I have a roommate who loves politics and seems to know all the current events and the potential impacts that they will have on society. I really enjoy discussing these topics with him, and we have once discussed FDR’s New Deal programs and how a lot of them didn’t work. He doesn’t know that much about the Agricultural Adjustment Act, so I thought it would be good to study something that he didn’t know much about so that when we talk politics I will be able to have something to talk about.

I am a resolute republican, and love to talk about the issues that affect our country. I love to analyze and figure out better ways that our country could be run. Doing research on the AAA will allow me to study and think of how that was a good thing or a bad thing. I already know that FDR was a devout democrat, and I have a feeling that everything that he did while he was in office was done from a very solid democratic viewpoint. That makes me automatically question those things. The AAA I think will be something that seemed to be a good idea, but resulted as causing more problems than is fixed. In my research paper I plan on figuring out what those problems were and discussing their effects.

The other reason that I want to do this paper is because when people ask me about what I am doing my paper on, I love to tell them my topic and then talk a little bit about it to show that I know what I’m talking about. It makes me seem smart.