Ethanol: All You Needed to See

At the behest of my longsuffering better half, I watched GWB capitulate to the Socialist Axis in Congress the other night.

Big Gummint, Big Gummint, Big Gummint, blah, spend, spend, spend, blah, yap.

(puke, puke, puke.)

Iraq was an exception, as was the WOT. It would be very helpful for the President if he would find a nice short rhetorical device by which he could connect those dots, but he's undoubtedly working on it, right?

Then came Big Gummint: Energy!

When he announced that Corn-A-Hole[ing] the Republic was on his agenda, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Corn-A-Hole) almost jumped out of his chair with glee (the camera caught it.)

That was all one needed to see or know about the issue.

But there's another thing one should know:

Net of the tax subsidy, the price of ethanol is $2.04 a gallon, which is 70 cents more than the $1.34 wholesale price of gasoline. And the energy content of ethanol is only two-thirds that of gasoline. (Forbes)

Thanks, George.

Even more here, including the following:

“Right now Congress is giving billions to ethanol, biodiesel, and the nuclear industry,” Doug Koplow of Earth Track consulting firm said in the same Christian Science Monitor article. About $6 billion in 2006 went to subsidize ethanol. (Only nukes make sense.)

Bush’s desire to continue “investing” in ethanol can only mean more mandates and subsidies for the energy source – funded by taxpayers.

“President Bush is proposing a huge expansion of the corporate welfare state,” said Ebell, CEI’s Director of Energy Policy, in a release dated Jan. 23, 2007.

The article also points out that the Middle East only provides about 20% of our imported oil; Mexico and Canada supply the majority of imports.

So GWB simultaneously proposes to reduce the flow of USDollars to Mexico for oil, AND to increase the cost of food for poor Mexicans by increasing demand for corn (and the price, as a result.)

It's too tragic to be comical.