When in Bath, SD last week, Hillary Clinton chastised George Bush and John McCain for favoring a veto of the new Farm Bill passed by Congress. The more one looks into this bill the more that veto seems justified.
The Washington Examiner has been on the job in pointing out some of the more egregious examples of waste in this bill. Here is their Tim Carney:
The Farm Nutrition and Bioenergy Act, which cleared the House on Tuesday 318-106, is a cornucopia of boondoggles, rip-offs and handouts, but perhaps the most inexplicable part is the provision instructing the federal government to buy “surplus” sugar from sugar growers and then sell it to make ethanol. Taxpayers will buy overpriced sugar and then sell it to ethanol makers at an artificially low price — a sweet deal for sugar and ethanol barons, and a raw deal for taxpayers. (snip)
Sugar companies need to be this active politically because their business depends on government regulation and subsidies. The farm bill headed to the White House this week guarantees that 85 percent of all sugar sold in the U.S. will be grown domestically. That means the federal government will fiercely restrict imports from other nations, driving up the price we pay for sugar.
This continues the long-running restrictions on sugar imports, which make our sugar more expensive. In 2007, raw sugar cost $11.60 per pound in the rest of the world, but $20.99 per pound here. Of course this makes our food more expensive.
Finally (actually, there are other sugar subsidies in the farm bill, but too many to list), there is the seemingly Cunningham-inspired sugar-to-ethanol program: The USDA buys “excess sugar” and sells it to ethanol makers — and only ethanol makers. The first problem here is that “excess sugar” means any sugar that sugar growers want to keep off the market to further drive up prices. Second, when the USDA can sell the sugar only to ethanol makers, there’s no way the USDA will get a good price.
The tax payer and consumer gets ripped two ways, by spending almost double the going rate for sugar while then paying out to subsidize ethanol producers (and protecting them from foreign competition). Carney is right. If any private business operated like this people would be going to jail. Talk about a sweet deal.
The editors of the paper also chime in:
There also are inexcusable local-interest flimflams such as a $250 million tax credit for a private land sale in Montana and a provision to “sell” national forest land, necessitating a shifting of the Appalachian Trail, to benefit a Vermont ski resort. Worse -- and this is brand new -- House and Senate negotiators “air-dropped” several expensive provisions into the bill that neither chamber had voted on, including $170 million for salmon fisheries in California. Then there is yet another fuel subsidy, this one for “cellulosic” ethanol, at a five-year cost to taxpayers of $348 million. All of this, at a time when the federal deficit this year is expected to hit $400 billion and the federal debt approaches $9.4 trillion. In short, this bill is so stuffed that it deserves to be named by an agricultural term -- bull, uh, manure.
Speaking of ethanol, David Freddoso calculates that given all the government money from all levels of government spent on ethanol, we could give $44,000 a year to every single person involved in ethanol production, from the farmer to the plant worker to the guy who drives the truck. As it is we spend that much money ($6-$8 billion overall) to produce maybe two days of gas. And that's assuming ethanol is not an net energy loser, which is what some argue.
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