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You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / Here’s a Novel Idea

Reader Interactions

71Comments

  1. 1.

    cathyx

    Do you want to bankrupt the farmers and food processors even more? They need their handouts.

  4. 4.

    Ron Beasley

    The problem is HFCS is still much easier to use. It can be sent through pipes and transported via tanker trucks so you would probably have to tax the HFCS.

  7. 7.

    the Conster

    Then people wouldn’t develop diabesity and need pharmaceuticals, then where would the economy be, smart guy, huh?

  8. 8.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    Let’s see:
    1. Reduce the number of ways corn can be sold,
    2. Make the price of corn jump through the roof.

    I suspect number 2 will always be the final answer. See oil.

  10. 10.

    Villago Delenda Est

    You’re not thinking, John, about the poor ADM executives who would have smaller bonuses.

    You’re heartless, did you know that?

  13. 13.

    Wazmo

    Then that would impact those who sell Mexican/Passover-certified Coca-Cola, which commands a huge price premium.

  14. 14.

    The Ancient Randonneur

    This is one area where you get bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition to these price supports. Geography and constituency play the deciding factor. Farm state Democrats and Republicans actually agreeing on something. Go figure.

  17. 17.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    Even better idea: stop using corn to make popcorn. Use okra or celery instead.

  19. 19.

    Emdee

    The old old story (and I read this when I was a teenager, back when we had to get our issues of Newsweek from Mr. Gutenberg himself) goes like this:

    The sugar industry successfully petitioned (read “lobbied”) Congress to set a floor on sugar prices of 25¢ per pound. This was at a time when global sugar prices were somewhere around 5¢ per pound, a price at which the American sugar industry found it difficult to compete domestically.

    Not too long after this, the corn growers figured out how to make high-fructose corn syrup, which they could sell profitably for 20¢ per pound (in sugar equivalence). As the granulated sugar industry had successfully argued then—and now—this stuff wasn’t “real sugar” so it wasn’t subject to the 25¢-per-pound floor. That’s when all the soft drink and industrial food processors shifted to HFCS, because it was 20% cheaper. That’s when we had the “Pepsi Challenge,” because Pepsi’s formula worked better with HFCS than Coke’s did. That’s when Coke reformulated for HFCS, giving “New Coke,” and all that stuff.

    That’s also why soft drinks everywhere else in the world are always made with pure cane/beet sugar: outside of the US floor, it’s about 25% of the price of HFCS.

    Or so the story goes. I have no citations, and this comment is worth pretty much exactly what you paid for it, caveat emptor, YMMV, and so on.

  24. 24.

    Richard

    http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/241601-lawmakers-sign-letter-urging-epa-to-lower-corn-ethanol-target

    A bipartisan group of 135 lawmakers signed a letter Wednesday asking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to adjust a rule that requires corn ethanol production for transportation fuel…Livestock groups on Monday filed a petition for a waiver from the RFS with the EPA. They said the drought that has whittled corn crops, combined with the mandate for corn ethanol production, is driving up feed prices. In turn, that has forced ranchers to curtail some operations, which ranchers say will increase meat costs for consumers.

  25. 25.

    Elias

    If corporations are people too, why can Mitt Romney own them? Enforce the 13th Amendment. You hear me businesses? You have nothing to lose but your chains.

  26. 26.

    Mjaum

    Sort of off-topic-ish… I just read that americans, due to the draught, have started painting their lawns.

    Green, one assumes.

    Nah, there’s no global warming here. Nor any crazy people. No sir!

    I just feel that this seriously misses the point somewhere. I feel like the whole world has turned into the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy…

  27. 27.

    bingbango

    Cole and his paranoid “Global Food Riots” blathering continues unabated. Stay gloomy Cole. Sucks to be you.

  28. 28.

    Ben Franklin

    Imagine the economic repercussions…..

    Less falsely diagnosed ADHD

    Fewer type II Diabetics

    A more resilient physiology for the Body Politic.

    We can’t survive that disaster.

  30. 30.

    Seebach

    I expect corn supports will go away when hemp is legalized. So, after the collapse of the US or if Obama has a really awesome lame duck period.

  32. 32.

    tuna

    Some hedge fund is now looking into buying up all the cane sugar and holding it off the market until it’s costs as much as the corn stuff.

  33. 33.

    Michael

    Grand Idea Mr Cole. Especially since those bastards at American Crystal Sugar (beet sugar) are locking out their union workers. Coincidentally, I was one of those union workers many years ago and we were underpaid then in the face of record profits and I’m sure the same holds true today. Screw them.

  34. 34.

    danah gaz (fka gaz)

    @Mjaum:

    I just feel that this seriously misses the point somewhere. I feel like the whole world has turned into the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy…

    You too? For some reason I keep thinking of that passage (I think it was in Mostly Harmless) where the Guide explains the economic collapse of whole planets due to the proliferation of shoe stores.

    Don’t ask me why.

  35. 35.

    Jay S

    @Mjaum: Cliff Mass makes a good case that the current US weather pattern is not caused by global warming here.

    But sometimes the atmosphere “locks up”, with a ridges or troughs staying in one location and increasing in amplitude. This locking up is often termed blocking. Blocking is not well understood, sometimes we can figure out why it is happening, but often we are clueless. In fact, blocking can happen quite naturally as part of the non-linear, complex physics of the atmosphere.
    …
    Many of the extreme weather situations are associated with such locking of the atmosphere. Why has the middle of the U.S. experienced apersistent heat/drought and the West Coast has been cool and wet? You guessed it–the upper flow pattern has been locked in a configuration of a ridge over the central U.S. and troughs along the coasts.

    It appears that this US weather is too extreme to be blamed on the current measured global warming.

    ETA Cliff Mass is not a global warming denialist.

  36. 36.

    Mjaum

    @Jay S: Um. Right. Because if it is too extreme, then it can’t be global warming. After all, global warming happens in easily measured, non-variable, unchaotic ways.

    Want to buy a bridge? Or two? I’ll throw in a tunnel for free. After all, you’d only be paying for nothing, right? That’s cheap!

    (I spent some time on PJmedia earlier. I think I broke something. It may have been my sarcasm. Or my irony. So sorry.)

  39. 39.

    Cermet

    @Jay S: Yet this is exactly what climate change calls for from its models – all weather types occur more often and longer. No one ever said that a climate model is anything but a software program constructed by human minds that provides a rough set of global average numbers for the model earth – luckly, math and the universe seem to have a real relationship. Yes, these models do in fact show tends in the real climate (never weather) that do occur for the Earth. Yet, these models never will be, and never were exact matchs to real global weather – just give global averages that track very close to what really does happen. As always, people can not seperate weather from climate. That is never an issue for people who read with an open mind.

  40. 40.

    Spatula

    I take pleasure in the fact that most of the states suffering most from the current drought/heat are as Red as the flames that shall soon consume them and their four door pick em up trucks.

  41. 41.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Just Some Fuckhead: If it worked, it would the most useful thing ever done with either celery or okra. (I know it ain’t gumbo if it ain’t got okra, but I leave the slimy little okra bits in the bowl. A dill pickle spear works better in a bloody mary.)

  42. 42.

    Linda Featheringill

    @Jay S:

    Blocked weather systems:

    Yes, they’ve happened before and will happen again. However, as global warming progresses, when heat is trapped in an area the temperatures can climb higher than they used to.

    BTW: In Oklahoma, average highs for July and August is about 95 degrees F. [Forgot where I got that number.] So when the temps there are 10-15 degrees higher than that for days on end, is that not an indication of more heat being in the system?

  43. 43.

    SteveinSC

    If we were to use the same amount of land that we farm and live on (18 per cent is arable) and used solar cells we could generate an average daily electrical power (counting zero for night in the average) more than an order of magnitude greater than our daily consumption. The solar cells are effectively of infinite lifetime, so no matter how much energy it takes to make them, we will always recover the cost. Major problem is storage for night-recovery, but then at night we don’t use that much energy, so maybe the new battery technologies could help. I.e. 2005 U.S. energy consumption 1×10**20 joules. Solar half day at 1000 watts per square meter peak, 20 percent solar cell efficiency and 1/pi average day and night is 4×10**21 joules per year using 18% of non-arable land.

  45. 45.

    El Cid

    Some look to the near future and see global food riots, because they’re gloomy; others look to near future and see global food raves!

  47. 47.

    some guy

    another banner day for Al-Qaida today, with summary executions in Alleppo today.

    smell the freedom!

  48. 48.

    trollhattan

    @John Cole,

    A few months back you asked the collective what topics should the front pagers be looking at that you weren’t focusing on already, and I think I responded climate change and the Farm Bill reauthorization, so here’s a twofer.

  52. 52.

    Ocotillo

    Hey while we are at it, let’s normalize relations with Cuba and buy their sugar to use for ethanol.

  54. 54.

    Heliopause

    You don’t understand, John, we’re as dependent on corn as the Irish were on potatoes. If this drought keeps up a couple more years we’ll all have to emigrate to China. In a hundred years they’ll celebrate the 4th of July as a quaint little ethnic festival.

  55. 55.

    Hypatia's Momma

    @Linda Featheringill:

    In Oklahoma, average highs for July and August is about 95 degrees F. [Forgot where I got that number.] So when the temps there are 10-15 degrees higher than that for days on end, is that not an indication of more heat being in the system?

    In order for the historical average to be 95F, then some days are going to have to be higher than 95F and some lower.

  56. 56.

    Cain

    @Heliopause:

    If we could get the red staters to move and leave the liberals here that would be best. Those guys will be quite comfortable in China except for not being able to own guns.

  59. 59.

    Another Halocene Human

    @Michael: The US gov has actively been on the side of the companies in crushing private sector unions since 1980. (It’s been crushing farm worker unions since the 1940s.)

  60. 60.

    Another Halocene Human

    What if the US government gave labor the same treatment as anti-abortion activists give abortion rights, slowly making more and more illegal until their activities are so hampered that people just plain get boxed in and give up … and nobody noticed?

    Americans don’t not want unions any more than women don’t want access to reproductive services in red states, but they have no access to effective ones in either case. Working class GOP voters are the prom night dumpster babies of our political hellscape.

  61. 61.

    Another Halocene Human

    @Jesse Ewiak: Watching them discuss why government needs to intervene in the crop commodity markets is so cute.

    Being a libertarian means being able to congratulate yourself on being such a deep and insightful thinker for finally sussing out what the rest of us learned before we were 17?

  63. 63.

    joel hanes

    Our host asks the musical question:

    why don’t we do something smart like remove all the price supports and tariffs for sugar production?</em?

    Because Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, corrupt corporatist "New Democrat" and currently DNC chair, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Sugar, and is mobbed up with the Cuban expatriate right.

  65. 65.

    tybee

    @Emdee:

    that’s pretty close to what i recall as well.
    i worked for “big sugar” for some years in the 90’s.

    to understand sugar prices and controls, you also need to know one name: fanjul

  67. 67.

    chopper

    well.

    Already some places are grappling with the issue. Take Indonesia, where soybeans are used to make tofu, the staple protein for the country’s poor. There, soybean prices have risen 33 percent in the past month, and are already causing tensions. Yesterday, there were clashes in Jakarta and other major cities in markets as a coalition of tofu producers sought to enforce a national production strike protesting against a 5 percent soybean import duty.

  68. 68.

    chopper

    here’s the drought map, projected through october.

    note the only improvement is in the desert southwest and portions of the rockies where little is grown. note also the huge swaths of drought include pretty much the entire wheat and corn belts.

  69. 69.

    John M. Burt

    Price supports are basically a back-door way of adding a little “command economy” mojo to the “free market”. The corn situation shows that there are indeed worse things than a command economy based on what people need, which is a command economy based on making profits for a chosen few.

  71. 71.

    Don

    The sugar price floor has cost us jobs and manufacturing too. There’s abandoned candy facilities in Chicago where operations have been moved to Mexico not for labor reasons but because of that artificially increased sugar price. Make it out of the US and you don’t have to pay as much. Various facts and figures here: http://sugarreform.org/

    I joke with my wife that we were meant to be. She works for a trade association representing confectioner manufacturers (they spun off the above linked PAC) so they dislike big sugar. I grew up in South Florida and have environmental leanings so I despise them for all the destruction they wrought on the Everglades.

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