Tariff on imported ethanol should be removed

With the average price of gasoline nationwide over $3 per gallon, it takes a bite out of your wallet. Kiplinger reported that since January, the price of a gallon of gasoline has jumped by $1 per gallon on average, which is equivalent to an $80 billion tax on American consumers. With so much corn being fermented into ethanol and mixed with our gasoline, the price of corn has shot up. This drives up the price of the food we eat. Kiplinger reported that soaring food prices will cost Americans the equivalent of another $30 billion tax, this year. To put these billions in personal terms, each American will pay approximately $100 more this year for food compared to last year because of ethanol. I think the environmentalists have not been honest in telling us the true cost of renewable energy like ethanol. If the energy needed to plant corn, fertilize, harvest and ferment corn into ethanol is greater than the energy we receive from ethanol (think about the second law of thermodynamics) then why are we wasting money on ethanol?

The answer is politics. Many midwestern farmers vote in the Iowa Presidential Primary. So if you want to be president of the United States, you need to support ethanol. Farmers get richer, politicians get elected and the rest of us get poorer every time we fill up at the gas station or buy food.

What can we do? One thing we can do is remove the 54 cents per gallon tariff farmers demanded on imported ethanol. Brazil makes ethanol out of sugar cane, which comes up every year and does not need to be planted. They get more tropical sunlight and labor is cheaper in Brazil. Therefore, Brazil can produce ethanol cheaper than corn farmers especially if corn farmers are shipping by rail and Brazil by sea to places like New Jersey.

If you want cheaper gas prices and food prices, inform your Congressman and Senators to remove the tariff they placed on imported ethanol.

Martin A. "Skip" Jessen

Edison