WSJ on Ethanol

[TOM4CWB]

Fransisco,

I think there should be one thing we can agree on.

If you step in front of a freight train going 110km/hr... it will hardly know the difference when it schmucks you on the cow catcher.

My points are simple observations... not personal views of what I "want" to see happen! Please don't confuse one for the other!

Knowing where we are going and why... is half the skill of being a good manager that can guide a family business between the mines in the field farmers must trek through.

[jensend]

i think part of what tom is saying (pretty tough to interpret at times, though!) is that the playing field is has so many hills and valleys in it now that you can't see the middle from any side of it. i don't know how you level it. nobody can afford to be the first to have their subsidy taken away. what per centage of a farmer's income comes from subsidies or tax breaks? how many farmers could survive without them?

[Fransisco]

Well Tom that brings me back to my first point which was this, -I doubt that ethanol has a non subsidized future outside of sugar cane territory.-

It's not so much about getting hit by the train as it is riding one that may be running out of steam.

[Fransisco]

Jen, Ronald Reagen had a saying about how government looks at a business. "If it moves, you tax it, if it keeps moving you regulate it, if it stops moving, you subsidize it."

Less of the first two means you can get away with less of the third. If we as farmers could simply keep more of the money we make in the good times we wouldn't need the handouts to get us through the bad.

[jensend]

that's fine but my point is how do you get there? how do you dismantle a system that has built into a monster over decades? do you want to be the first to take the hit?

[jensend]

and just while we're all helping each other out with grammar, spelling, etc. you might want to check reagan.

[TOM4CWB]

Fransisco,

I get a real kick out of watching the OPEC folks play their game.

How can OPEC be legal in the first place!

Price fixing should be illegal under WTO rules one would think... yet these guys do whatever they feel like. Stop the flow... play the game... and this is a "free market"?


It doesn't matter if it is the AWB, CWB or OPEC... when these players enter the futures market... they are not playing with the same deck of cards as everyone else!

[Fransisco]

One thing about oil is that it definitely doesn't work in the 'free market' arena. Some of it does but the vast majority of it doesn't.