Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform blasts Congress for keeping the ethanol party going in How Many Senators Does It Take To Screw A Taxpayer?
When bipartisanship breaks out in Washington DC, check to make sure your wallet is still in your pocket. Every time you fill up your car this winter you are participating in the biggest taxpayer swindle in history. Forcing consumers to use domestically produced ethanol is one of the single biggest boondoggles ever committed by the corrupt brainless twits in Washington DC. Ethanol prices have soared 30% in the last year as the supplies of corn have plunged. Only a policy created in Washington DC could drive up the prices of gasoline and food, with the added benefits of costing the American taxpayer billions in tax subsidies and killing people in 3rd world countries.
The grand lame duck Congress tax compromise extended a 45-cent incentive to ethanol refiners for each gallon of the fuel blended with gasoline and renewed a 54-cent tariff on Brazilian imports. The extension of these subsidies, besides costing American taxpayers $6 billion per year, has the added benefit of driving up food costs across the globe, causing food riots in Tunisia, and resulting in the starving of poor peasants throughout the world. This taxpayer boondoggle is a real feather in the cap of that fiscally conservative curmudgeon Senator Charley Grassley. He was joined in this noble effort by another fiscal conservative, presidential hopeful John Thune...
Source: The Wall Street Journal's Amber Waves of Ethanol
Quinn's article contains plenty of data about why corn ethanol is a really bad idea, so I recommend you read the whole thing. For example, the United States is by far the largest corn exporter in the world, and there's a world-wide food crisis going on now, but farmers in the Midwest will devote 40% of their corn crop to making moonshine (graph above). Global food prices are soaring.
Source: FAO Food Price Index
Those of us who used to write about America's frightening oil import dependency thought we had won this battle years ago. The only people defending ethanol as a workable, efficient substitute for gasoline in 2007 were Iowa corn farmers. And that's still true today. But as Jim Quinn points out, our corrrupt politics never changes—
A bipartisan group of 15 senators signed a letter in late November demanding an extension of U.S. ethanol subsidies. I wonder if the fact that they have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions during the past six years from pro-ethanol companies and interest groups like ADM, Monsanto, the National Corn Growers Association, and the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association had anything to do with this demand. You can always count on a Senator to do what’s best for his re-election campaign rather than what is best for the country...
And because debilitating, destructive political corruption is as constant as the sunrise, I switched gears in early 2010. No longer would I write about the inadequacies and dangers of switching from gasoline to corn ethanol. I gave up. Let's face it, being right about these issues doesn't matter. It's ADM, Monsanto and the National Corn Growers association who run this particular show. South Dakota Senator and presidential hopeful John Thune received $493,600 from Agribusiness during his successful 2010 campaign.
How can the truth compete with that?
It's probably safer than eating some of that crap.
"A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health"
http://www.biolsci.org/v05p0706.htm#headingA11
Posted by: Ryan Wolfe | 01/28/2011 at 10:21 AM