Roman wrote:
“The reason we are not importing Brazilian ethanol is because we do not want a dependence on another country.”

I wasn’t looking at the importing of Brazilian ethanol, although that could be an option perhaps?  I was curious as to whether it was a viable option to grow sugarcane verses corn in the US.

The reason we are not importing Brazilian ethanol is because we do not want a dependence on another country. This is foolish. However, it should be appreciated by the liberal audience of this site. Since you are so much against trade and so much for protectionism and subsidies, you have to love ethanol subsidies, regardless of whether they make any sense or not.

I don’t care if GWB signed it, ethanol subsidies is a liberal idea through and through. It basically sums up all tenets of liberal economic policy:

Use money we don’t have to subsidize a stupid industry and justify it by using protectionist rhetoric. Gotta love it!

Michael Smith wrote:
“The amount of energy obtained from 1 gallon of ethonal fuel, as compared to regular gasoline, is less than 50%.  That means more than twice as much ‘bio fuel’ to go the same distance as gasoline. Even if every single bushel of corn were turned into ethanol it woluld only replace 4-6% of Americas fuel needs.”

I agree that corn for ethanol is a poor choice for bio-fuel, (It should be noted that the actually energy produced would be more in the 75% range).  What I am curious is why our goverment, who is pushing for corn based ethanol hasn’t taken a look at Brazil who uses sugarcane based ethanol which produces nine times the amount of energy that a gallon of gas does.  Brazil does not depend on foreign oil or so the so the story goes.  That being said I can only conclude that our climate wouldn’t support the growth of sugarcane or our goverment would prefer to have the US involved in a plan which appears to be a failure..for reasons one can only speculate.  CNN had a very good report on this last Sunday.

The complete partisanship of this site is seen by this post.

This is one of the worst bills this Congress has passed. It is overloaded with pork. It gives subsidies to farmers making millions, regardless of how high commodity prices get. Every single economist of note has come out against this bill and yet this site is in support of it because the Democratic politicians (who cannot wait to engorge themselves on this pork) are in support of it.

If we all ()as it seems) more or less agree that the farm bill deserves to die, why are we on the same side as GWB, and opposed to a veto-proof cadre of our representatives in congress. 

Smells like Pork at an election year barbecue.

For once I have something to agree upon with Bush.

A household can earn as much as $2.5 million and continue to receive farm subsidies under the bill. You can fix the subsidies without jettisoning the rest - that’s the point.

A key group of words in this article are “ bio fuels”. Bio fuels, in the form of Ethanol are a waste of time and money.  The amount of energy obtained from 1 gallon of ethonal fuel, as compared to regular gasoline, is less than 50%.  That means more than twice as much ‘bio fuel’ to go the same distance as gasoline. Even if every single bushel of corn were turned into ethanol it woluld only replace 4-6% of Americas fuel needs.  Once that corn is gone what will be used to make corn flour or animal feeds?