Completely OT: Inflation

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Oct 04, 2005, Mike Schwartz (PC Support) wrote:
>> The ethanol story sounds good, until you factor in the energy
>> required to grow the grains from which it is derived, and the
>> energy required to transport it to the sites where it is
>> produced, and then the energy required to ferment and distill
>> it.  Recent studies have shown it to be a net energy loss -
>> though it does have some economic benefits for those in the
>> grain belt.
>> 
>> Bob
>
>     This is an excellent economic case in point.  Ethanol does cost more
>per gallon than gasoline, and the energy costs to produce it are one reason.
>It's not totally clean, either.  They burn corn stalks to heat the stills,
>and that adds something to air pollution, despite the fact that they scrub
>the smoke.
>
>       All that producing a gallon of ethanol really accomplishes is
>reducing our import of foreign oil at additional cost to us, and at this
>point I'd have to start getting into oil cartels and so forth, so I'll break
>off with by quoting my economics professor that "99% of the reasons people
>do things boil down to economics.  It's the other 1% of the reasons you have
>to watch out for."  
>
>    I should mention that he never did convince some of the gals who came
>from family farms that there wasn't any economic reason why the family farms
>"had to" survive...

One could argue that one of the main reasons for the U.S.  government's
agricultural subsidies is to keep food prices down artifically thus masking
the real inflation.  This could well be more important to the government
types than buying votes of farmers.

Bill
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