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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (741254)	5/22/2006 5:33:59 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

Silly tariffs crimp the hose May. 22, 2006 12:00 AM azcentral.com Maybe one day ethanol - as a fuel additive, or even as a replacement to fossil fuels - will save us from the vagaries of Big Oil. Many of the participants at the recent Clean Cities Congress and Expo in downtown Phoenix certainly hope so. Plenty of ethanol-fueled engines were on display at the alternative-fuel and advanced-vehicle technology event. Ethanol is something to hope for, certainly. In the real world of $3 per gallon gas, however, ethanol - or, more precisely, ethanol politics - is a major contributor to our wallet woes. In the United States, ethanol is mostly a byproduct of corn. And largely in pursuit of a U.S. energy policy that seeks to double the consumption of ethanol fuel additives to nearly 8 billion gallons per year by 2012, the federal government subsidizes the bejeebers out of corn. Between 1995 and 2004, U.S. taxpayers paid $41.9 billion to U.S. corn farmers, according to the farm-subsidy database of the Environmental Working Group. That's just one side of the artificially inflated cost of ethanol to consumers. It gets much worse. Since a massive subsidy to U.S. agribusiness ($4.5 billion in 2004 alone) apparently isn't enough to keep the ethanol industry competitive, the United States assesses a 2.5 percent tariff on imported ethanol, as well as a 54 cents per gallon second duty. Between congressional mandates for ethanol use in fuel and an artificially strangled supply of the product, prices for ethanol are soaring. And as Arizona's Sen. Jon Kyl and Rep. John Shadegg have observed, that combination has contributed mightily to the soaring cost of fuel at the pump. Kyl, along with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has introduced legislation to permanently reduce the absurdly high 54 cents per gallon tariff on imported ethanol. Shadegg has introduced similar legislation in the House. The proposals are especially important to Arizona, where ethanol must be hauled by trucks and added into seasonally required fuel mixtures. It is a costly, cumbersome system that adds significantly to what drivers here must pay at the pump. It is the height of absurdity that the tariffs are levied in the first place. If Congress is serious about driving down the pump price of fuel, a first (and ridiculously easy) first step would be to stop artificially crimping the market of a fuel additive that Congress demands we use.