Food and Oil

Time reports that high oil prices may be contributing to higher prices and shortages for the worldwide food market.  Yet right now, liberals are pushing energy policy that would have the effect of making prices higher.  A $16 billion tax on oil companies — which will surely get passed down to consumers — came up in Congress this year, and all the Democrats have energy plans that, as API’s John Felmy pointed out a few days ago, seek to make a constricted energy market even tighter.

Meanwhile, as Dennis Avery pointed out in a recent CEI paper, our woeful biofuels policy wastes taxpayer dollars promoting inefficient fuels that tie up otherwise good farming land with unnecessary biofuel crops planted only for the subsidies they generate.  No doubt many attempts will be made to blame the oil industry for a lot of these problems.  But bad policy, wasteful spending, and a refusal to recognize how politically expedient rules and regulations ripple out into unexpected harmful consequences are what’s at the heart of the issue.