Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
individuals. The reason is simple. Politicians who take very
small amounts of money from many taxpayers and give it all
to a few people will not anger the taxpayers but will cause
the recipients to be very gracious—and that gratitude will be
expressed in campaign contributions.
[Farm subsidies] were never designed to be subsidies to
help poor people. . . . The only decent reason to have these
subsidy programs is because we've always had them.
There's no other reason you can think of.
—Daniel A. Sumner, “Agricultural Subsidies:
Corporate Welfare for Farmers,” ReasonTV.com,
interview by Nick Gillespie, January 27, 2009,
accessed June 3, 2013, at
http://www.youtube.com/
Ethanol subsidies were ostensibly created to benefit the
environment. Environmentalists may have backed them at
first but now seem opposed to ethanol.
Rolling Stone
maga-
zine published an article titled “The Ethanol Scam,” claiming
ethanol harms the environment, and though there is disagree-
ment about whether this is the case, environmental groups
now show little support for ethanol. Everyone seems to dislike
ethanol now, except corn and ethanol producers.
Like traditional farm subsidies, the real origin-story of eth-
anol subsidies is politics. Al Gore has confessed that any envi-
ronmental benefits are trivial, and when he explained his past
support for ethanol he said the following:
One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid
particular attention to the farmers in my home state of
Tennessee and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in
the state of Iowa because I was about to run for President.
—“Al Gore's Ethanol Epiphany,”
Wall Street Journal,
November 27-28, 2010, A16.
