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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Friday, January 6, 2012

6 January - Blogs I'm Following

English: Montage of Southern California images...Image via Wikipedia
English: Participants of the Regional Workshop...Image via Wikipedia
Harbin (DDG 112) entering San Diego harborImage via Wikipedia
Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: Robert McCall's A...Image by Chris Devers via Flickr
Portrait of Glenn Greenwald -creator of Unclai...Image via Wikipedia
 2012 United States Government Terrorist Identification Chart

Russian blogger sneaks into state's 'high-security" rocket plant through hole in fence

Ethanol Subsidies: Not Gone, Just Hidden a Little Better

Corn ethanol, it turns out is actively worse for the environment than even gasoline, farmers responded to the subsidies by reducing the amount of farmland used for food production, and this drove up the price of staple food worldwide. What's more, back when the subsidies were enacted corn farmers were already doing pretty well. We were shoveling $10 billion in ag welfare to a group of people who were already pretty rich. In fact, ethanol subsidies are such obviously appalling policy that it's one of the rare areas that both liberals and conservatives agree about. In theory, anyway. 

Deficit hawks, environmentalists, and food processors are celebrating the expiration of the ethanol tax credit. This corporate handout gave $0.45 to ethanol producers for every gallon they produced and cost taxpayers $6 billion in 2011. So why did the powerful corn ethanol lobby let it expire without an apparent fight? The answer lies in legislation known as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which creates government-guaranteed demand that keeps corn prices high and generates massive farm profits. Removing the tax credit but keeping the RFS is like scraping a little frosting from the ethanol-boondoggle cake.
The RFS mandates that at least 37 percent of the 2011-12 corn crop be converted to ethanol and blended with the gasoline that powers our cars....[As a result] the current price of corn on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is about $6.50 per bushel—almost triple the pre-mandate level.
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