Congress Cant Do Nothin Right - Road to the Middle Class

THANK GOODNESS for one thing. What with the spiraling increase in food prices the leaders of our beloved Congress are going to fight for the people against the powerful on ethanol.

They are going to lower ethanol subsidies, according to Stephen Dinan.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer allowed as how this was a case of “unintended consequences.”

"The view was to look to alternatives and try to become more dependent on the Midwest than the Middle East. I mean, that was the theory. Obviously, sometimes there are unforeseen or unintended consequences of actions," Mr. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, told reporters yesterday.

Well, why don’t we go a bit further and say that whenever Congress enacts a subsidy it is almost bound to screw things up.

It’s just that when you start playing the subsidy game with energy and food you have a much better chance of creating a mess than, say subsidies for college.

That’s because there is an open market for energy and food. But college is a witch’s brew of privilege and rent seeking that simmers away in a back room.

Actually, college subsidies—including subsidies paid to students and subsidies paid directly to colleges—probably directly hurt people in just the same way as etehanol subsidies divert food-producing cropland into ethanol production. But the effects are more difficult to tease out, and don’t have the headline potential of soaring fuel and soaring food prices.

OK. Congress is going to take a baby step back to energy sanity. Now let’s do something serious about energy. Let’s drill for oil. Let’s open up the ocean for drilling. And let’s start building nuclear plants again.

After all, even the “consensus” scientists now say that global warming catastrophe is a little further off than they thought.

They’d have to. Global temperatures haven’t risen in ten years.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.