triticale - the wheat / rye guy

Corporate Welfare

Owen has a post on how a Wisconsin politician is telling the farmers he did it all for them. The rest of us are told fuel ethanol is for the environment (it isn't) and thus for us. In actuality the benificiary of fuel ethanol is the huge agribusinesses who process it amd spend some of the proceeds on campaign contributions.

There is a lesson here for others in government. Let us imagine for the sake of discussion that you are one of the people holding the reins, and want to transfer taxpayer dollars to a company whose core competancy is in engineering services to the oil industry. There are those who would suggest that the way to do this is to take advantage of a contracting procedure established by the previous administration, and spend billions of dollars liberating millions of people as an excuse to grant said company contracts on which they make a predetermined moderate profit. Not only would this be politically risky, it is also inefficient. If people in government wanted to transfer taxpayer dollars to a company whose core competancy is in engineering services to the oil industry all they would have needed to do is set up a bogus "alternative energy" program similar to fuel ethanol whereby extraction of shale oil is made price competitive at taxpayer expense. The voters would love it.