The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s September 2010 issue of its magazine, “Amber Waves,” has an excellent article on the U.S. domestic sugar program – its domestic market allotments, price supports, and import restrictions — and how even this program, which attempts to protect U.S. sugar producers from competition and price fluctuations, is affected by volatility in the world sugar market.
And that’s a timely topic, as this Wall Street Journal August 21 article makes clear. What has happened would have been easy to predict. Sugar users in the U.S. – mainly food and confectionery producers – have been asking the Secretary of Agriculture to increase the amount of sugar allowed to be imported into the country under tariff rate quotas that carry low tariff rates. Otherwise, sweetener users said, they would be facing supply shortages. Under the 2008 Farm Bill, at the beginning of the quota year, the Secretary is required to set the initial quota at the minimum the World Trade Organization requires, and can’t increase that before April 1 unless there is an emergency.
As the WSJ article notes, once the Secretary raised the quota, world sugar prices rose to 20 cents per pound, the highest level in five months. That compares with U.S. domestic sugar prices of about 34.13 cents a pound, kept artificially high due to government-mandated supply restrictions on both the domestic supply and the imports allowed.
CEI has long advocated the termination of the U.S. sugar program, which benefits a relatively small group of sugar producers, while raising food costs for consumers. It’s a prime example of why central planning doesn’t work.
by Hans Bader on August 12, 2010
in Agriculture, Bailout Watch, Economy, Employment, Energy, Environment, International, Legal, Natural Resources, Odds & Ends, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade, Zeitgeist
There are only 36,697 black farmers in the entire country, but in a class-action lawsuit, more than 86,000 African-Americans claimed to have suffered from race discrimination by the Department of Agriculture during their time as farmers. They are getting “‘virtually automatic’ $50,000 payouts” at taxpayer expense, thanks to the Obama administration. It has repeatedly loosened the requirements for payouts in a class-action lawsuit against the government known as the Pigford case, in order to make such payouts possible. Essentially, the Obama administration is using the case to award race-based reparations to people who never farmed or even intended to farm. The government’s collusion with the plaintiffs’ lawyers in this case will ultimately cost taxpayers billions.
The next time you hear President Obama on TV challenging his critics to identify any unnecessary government spending that can be cut, and suggesting that there is no waste to be found in the federal budget, keep this case in mind. In 2009, Obama made a big show of ordering his cabinet to come up with a measly $100 million in cuts even as he submitted a record budget request of $3.67 trillion (not counting hundreds of billions in “emergency” spending). That $100 million was less than 0.003 percent of the budget, and is much smaller than the billions that the government will ultimately waste on the Pigford case.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that “President Obama’s policies would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.” That’s despite the fact that there are $3 trillion in tax increases built into the president’s budget.
Obama recently signed a deficit-expanding $26 billion public-employee bailout. The stimulus package is now expected to cost $75 billion more than predicted. The stimulus package is using taxpayer subsidies to replace U.S. jobs with foreign green jobs. It also destroyed jobs in America’s export sector.
One issue in the Pigford case was the fact that people with bad credit ratings didn’t get loans from the Agriculture Department as often as people with good credit ratings. That was deemed “discrimination” because African-Americans tended to have lower credit ratings on average than whites.
The Code of Federal Regulations has 28 sections on food containers. Metal, glass, plastic, flexible, rigid – if you can put food in it, there are rules for it.
Recent innovations, such as easy-open tabs on cans, have prompted the Department of Agriculture to issue a 13-page update to its food container inspection regulations. If you have some spare time on your hands, you can have a look by clicking here.
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