This is one of the reasons why many people who vote for Republicans secretly hate them. The Democrat's claim that the Republican Party is the party of the rich is partly true, and it's drilled home when fat cats get corporate welfare.
Our own US Representative for Texas District 11 usually gets about 80% of the primary vote and about the same in the general election. He tells voters what they want to hear, he gets tons of free publicity from the local media, and he gets a million dollars per campaign season from interested parties. It's almost impossible to unseat an incumbent. The impossible has happened, but it won't happen here. By the way, he hates the idea of term limits.
But this isn't a rant about Agriculture Committee member and aspiring chairman, Mike Conaway. The subject here is an old one: Sugar and the way the Agriculture Committee allows the continuation of a depression era mechanism whereby the US pays millions of dollars each year to subsidize sugar producers and keep sugar prices high.
Kevin Williamson explains it very succinctly in Uncle Stupid’s Sugar Buzz. Excerpt:
It works like this: As I have argued here before, the United States does not have a government — it has a bank, and a very poorly run bank at that. The Bank of Uncle Stupid last year lent the nation’s poor, struggling sugar barons $862 million in order to improve their positively Dickensian conditions. With the fat harvest coming in, sugar prices are going down — and the public must, at all costs, be protected from low prices. If sugar prices take just another tiny little tick in a southerly direction, then an unusual provision built into the sugar barons’ loan agreements with the federal government kicks in: They don’t have to repay their loans in cash — they can repay them in raw sugar.
The government then sells that sugar at a steep discount to the ethanol industry which is responsible for such terrible ideas as the requirement that it be pumped it into our vehicle gas tanks.
Williamson ends with this:
Needless to say, your traditional brain-dead Chamber of Commerce–type useless Republican clock-puncher loves this stuff. So does Marco Rubio. If the so-called party of free enterprise cannot figure out a way to run against this kind of pillaging, then they do not deserve to win.
Here's an idea for a campaign slogan: Republicans! You'll get your money's worth!
By the way, the government caused high consumer price of sugar may be why food producers have replaced sugar with high fructose corn syrup. Yum!
Link via newmarksdoor.com.
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