If This Goes On…

Every once in a while you run across a story about an event that has almost no importance on its own – for example, a bill passing in the U.S. Senate that has no hope of passing in the House, and even less chance of being signed by the President – which is, nevertheless, a landmark occurrence in terms of its potential. Reporters and publishers love stories like these, because if you break them first, and especially if the competition misses them or fails to recognize their importance, you could gain the exclusive rights to the biggest news item of the year. Most of the time, however, all you get is the premiere coverage of a non-event. One such story hit this week when a bipartisan majority of the Senate voted to end the Federal subsidies for ethanol…

You can pick up the Wall Street Journal coverage of the story if you want to, but the basic idea is that 33 Republicans broke ranks to join 40 of their Democratic counterparts in voting to end the subsidy for produces of ethanol for use as a motor fuel. For more than 30 years, ethanol has been at the heart of the “renewable energy” movement – or, at least, the parts of it that involve huge companies increasing their profits by taking government funding to produce something for which there was already a high demand. But the problem with ethanol, either as an additive for gasoline or as the major component of the “E85” motor fuel you see sometimes here in the Midwest, is that so far no one has been able to produce the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline without spending more than the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline to make the ethanol – and the ratio is occasionally much higher than that. Far from saving natural resources, ethanol is actually taking more petroleum to make than it saves, and that doesn’t even count the petroleum-based fertilizers that are used to grown the corn from which the ethanol is made…

Even worse, in my opinion, is the fact that the increasing demand for corn has created massive increases in food prices in many communities that rely on corn for food – and the fact that, despite these problems, the Federal government is also still providing subsidies for corn production and paying some farmers not to grow more corn, in addition to the ethanol subsidy. Providing subsidies to gasoline producers and agribusiness corporations that are already obscenely rich is bad enough, but when doing so causes financial hardship (and occasionally famine) in poor populations and does nothing to provide the affordable motor fuel it was supposed to provide in the first place, someone really does need to call shenanigans. This is jus the first time anyone in Washington has actually done so…

For the moment, of course, it’s still a non-issue. The bill would have to get through the House of Representatives, which is apparently gearing up to protest that since legislation is supposed to start in the House, and this measure didn’t, the whole thing has to be thrown out and start over. The repeal would also have to be signed by the President, which is not likely to happen this close to the 2012 election, when the support of corn-producing states might be critical. And even if some miracle were to occur, this would still be only one set of government spending that drains our resources and does absolutely nothing for who doesn’t own stock in oil companies or agribusiness corporations; a cut of only $6 billion in a multi-trillion dollar deficit. But the system as it stands is broken; the reform politicians are not wrong when they say that the United States must embrace radical change, and soon, or go down in bankruptcy. And if legislative reform ever does occur, then it’s just possible that we saw the first stages of it this week, in a meaningless non-story in the back pages of the newspaper…

Stay tuned, folks. This could get interesting…