Ethanol Lobbyists: Friends of the Taxpayer

By -
You know how ethanol is great because it keeps gas prices down (.pdf)? Well did you also know that there is currently a 54-cent per gallon tariff on imported ethanol? You might think this is pure protectionism for the ethanol industry, but apparently not, according to their spokesman:

“We simply believe American taxpayers ought not to have to further subsidize Brazil’s or any other nation’s ethanol industry when we are trying to build one in this nation. The tariff is there to protect the taxpayer, not the ethanol producer.”

(BTW he is referring to the fact that right now, U.S. refiners get a 51-cent exemption on excise taxes for blending ethanol gallons into their output. So without the tariff, the refiners would naturally get the ethanol [to claim the tax credit, and also to comply with federal mandates on how many gallons of ethanol need to be in the mix] as cheaply as possible, say from Brazil.)

Comments

  1. nenhum1:44 PM

    I think that the problem is not ethanol, but cheap and good sugar from Brazil and Colombia.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bob Murphy5:16 PM

    Right, I was mostly focusing on the hypocrisy of the RFA guy.

    And what about cheap and good cocaine from Colombia? Government messes with that too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous10:49 PM

    Yes, most of these people are tremendous hypocrites.

    And cocaine, there is that too.

    But I don´t know if Brazilian ethanol could supply energy to balance the US needs. On the other hand, imported sugar would simply end syrup use on industrialized food.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more