Friday, August 24, 2007
Opinion
Iowa’s ethanol election
The presidential election cycle will soon move past its year-long preseason status and the true race will begin...
President George W. Bush (right) holds an ear of corn while farmer Ken Thompson counts the money handed to him by Bush for a bag of corn, in August 2004 in Davenport, Iowa.
CREDIT: TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images |
By Eric Von Haessler
As we round the bend of August, with Labor Day on the horizon, the presidential election cycle will soon move past its year-long preseason status and the true race will begin. This is the time we’ll start hearing about what an extraordinarily weak field of candidates is running for the nominations of their respective parties. Every four years, the slate of applicants is pronounced unworthy, write-in campaigns are bandied about and disgruntled voters talk about drafting this businessman or that social gadfly in place of the well-groomed, phony-baloney bunch that have crisscrossed their states begging for votes.
The only thing as sure as this quadrennial mumbling and grumbling is the absence of what may be the most important question of all: Why do citizens of two states, Iowa and New Hampshire, get such a disproportionate say in who will ultimately vie for the office of the presidency?
According to that source of changeable information, Wikipedia, the media gives the New Hampshire primary, the earliest statewide political party primary election, “and Iowa, the first state to hold a party caucus, usually a week before the New Hampshire primary—about half of all the attention paid to all states in the primary process, magnifying the state’s decision power.”
In a perfect world, we could trust New Hampshire’s and Iowa’s average Joes and Josephines to give an objective thumbs-up or thumbs-down for each candidate. It may surprise you to find that we’re not living in a perfect world, and that the residents of Iowa and New Hampshire represent nothing more than just two more voting blocs with intrinsic special needs and sacred pork-barrel projects they’re looking to protect.
The same is true of every state in the country, and yet our corn-fed fellow Americans in Iowa are an especially egregious mob. This state of welfare farmers has been able to hold this country’s alternative-energy policy hostage for decades now, mainly because they are always the first in the nation to give a yay or nay to prospective presidential aspirants.
The conversation is simple, blunt, and quick: “Support the continued subsidization of ethanol,” say the chronically obese voters of Iowa, “and we’ll consider giving you our vote.” No one, Republican or Democrat, gets a chance without granting this promise.
A visit to the propaganda site iowacorn.org spells out the folly of this all-or-nothing prescription to our energy woes, despite the site’s objective of promoting more ethanol use. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines of the “Ethanol Facts” section to spot real-world problems with the scheme. After skimming through a list of supposed blessings to your vehicle, you’ll find the “Production, Jobs, Use, and More” benefits. This is what all the Iowa fuss is about, and it is here that the rationale for the use of ethanol as an alternative energy source is revealed: Jobs, jobs, jobs. And federally mandated, guaranteed jobs at that.
The site brags that “One acre of corn can produce around 500 gallons of ethanol—enough to fuel six cars for one year with a 10 percent ethanol blend.” That’s right, one acre fuels six whole cars for a year. That’s provided they’re only getting 10 percent of their fuel needs from ethanol. How efficient! Other facts in this area get more to the point and are summed up in this gem found further down the page: “Increased use of renewable fuels, such as ethanol, could provide an additional $6.6 billion of net cash income annually for America’s farmers over the next 15 years.”
Ethanol may well be a part of the alternative energy solution. This country needs to kick its oil habit, if only to stop the perversity of pouring money into the hands of the very people who want to destroy it. But true answers will not come from subsidizing one solution over another. We need a Manhattan Project on alternative fuel sources if we’re to do something about this quickly.
The only person who can create such a project is the president of the United States, and he (or she) will never do that so long as they are forced to make a deal with Iowa’s subsidy-swilling eco-devils before even being considered for the job. SP
More of Eric Von Haessler’s musings can be found at myspace.com/madpundit.