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.