Ethanol politics

Ali T Winston By Ali T Winston The Star-Ledger
on July 28, 2007 at 5:24 AM

Since January, the price of gasoline nationwide has jumped $1 a gallon, equivalent to another $30 billion tax. Each American will pay approximately $100 more this year for food compared with last year because of ethanol. If the energy needed to plant, fertilize and harvest corn and ferment it into ethanol is greater than the energy we receive from ethanol, why are we wasting money on ethanol?
The answer is politics. Many Midwestern farmers vote in the Iowa presidential caucuses. So if you want to be president, you must support ethanol. Farmers get richer, politicians get elected and the rest of us get poorer every time we fill up at the gas station or buy food.
Let's remove the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff farmers demanded on imported ethanol. Brazil makes ethanol out of sugar cane, which comes up every year and doesn't need to be planted. Brazil has more tropical sunlight and cheaper labor. Therefore, Brazil can produce ethanol more cheaply than corn farmers can especially if corn farmers are shipping by rail and Brazil by sea to places like New Jersey.