How many times do I have to say this… If you give Joe Biden enough rope, he will hang himself.
Biden proved me right yet again by choosing Tom Vilsack as his tour bus buddy during the “No Malarkey” Tour.
Shake Down Artist
For those of you not familiar with the name, Vilsack is the former Obama Agriculture Secretary.
Post Obama, he cashed in his former position to take a job making nearly $1 million a year from Dairy Management Inc.
Dairy Management Inc. is considered a non-profit group, but it is more like a legal mafia.
The group promotes milk goods but it does so by making struggling dairy farmers pay mandatory fees.
This would not be such a bad thing if the group was not paying its top executives excessive salaries.
While dairy farmers are struggling to make ends meet, the average salary of the top 10 executives at the “non-profit” is about $800,000.
The fees collected by the organization are a result of “checkoff” collections by the federal government.
Dairy farmers are required to pay $.15 per 100 pounds of milk sold, which is the “checkoff” collection.
Roughly 33 percent of those fees go to fund programs like that of Dairy Management Inc.
Sarah Lloyd, a local dairy farmer, stated, “When we see that the funds that we’re mandated to pay through the checkoff are going to these really high salaries, it kind of just kicks you in the stomach.”
Kind of like Rev. Al Sharpton collecting almost $1 million a year for a non-profit that only generates about $6 million a year, but I digress.
Iowa Dairy Farmers Noticed
Vilsack also happens to be the former governor of Iowa, so farmers know who he is.
The fact that Vilsack has been on tour with Biden did not go unnoticed by the farmers.
Jake Davis, National Policy Director at Family Farm Action, stated, “Vice President Biden clearly didn’t think through the ramifications of having someone like Secretary Vilsack on the bus tour and writing your agriculture policy when the former secretary is taking a million dollars out of the pockets of dairy farmers across the country.”
He also called this a “clear misstep” by Biden, stating, “It just seems like a risk that one didn’t have to take.”
This is just one in a long line of gaffes by Joe Biden that is slowly but surely eating away at that cushion he had when he first entered the race.