Policymakers should end ethanol subsidies by the next
Now that the
Weirdness seems to be taking over the minds of normally sane people when candidates including Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney claim to believe that agricultural subsidies are necessary for "food security." Are markets so wildly inefficient that unless government pays the farmers, they will quit producing food and we'll all go hungry?
Washington politicians are so enthused about ethanol they not only subsidize it 51 cents a gallon, they impose a 54 cents per gallon tariff on imported ethanol and a mandate to burn 7.5 billion gallons per year by 2012, with a near-term goal of 15 billion. Ethanol refiners get tax credits, investors in ethanol plants can have their loans guaranteed and some producers get direct subsidies.
But virtually every claimed benefit (except the political ones) for ethanol is bogus. According to Robert Hahn, the former co-chair of the U.S. Alternative Fuels Council, if all the corn produced in the
The next
Tom Patterson is chairman of the Goldwater Institute, a former state legislator and emergency room physician. A longer version of this article originally appeared in the
No comments:
Post a Comment