It’s About Making Babies!

Mara Schiavocampo, NBC Nightly News digital correspondent, writes about “LOOMING FOOD CRISIS?“. People are starving, as close to home here in the Western Hemisphere as Haiti – at least, that is making the news today.

The following is a rambling rant, touching on several factors I feel contribute to weakening the US, and unfairly accelerating world hunger.

Hunger has always been a destabilizing force in the world. We need to solve the hunger problem, or the world will fall to war to capture food and food production resources.

Check with animal shelters and homeless shelters. Costs have already risen enough to threaten services at normal funding levels – and there is less funding available for charities.

Luxury markets – high end cars, motorcycles, bigger houses – are feeling a pinch as fewer people have surplus money they planned on just a few years ago. What rocks the high-end markets reduces resources available for mass markets.

Car mechanics for older cars may be keeping busy, if not busier, but the cost for parts, and the transportation costs to pick up parts is rising.

And I don’t want to hear any nonsense about the cost of the Iraqi war. Most of the money spent on that war goes to US suppliers and military payrolls and budgets. That means, that money is already being spent on (bolstering) the US economy. The big drains of US resources is services provided to illegal immigrants and funds sent by immigrants overseas, and the punishment Muslim nations are exacting on the US, through OPEC.

And, frankly, the spectre of surveillance and intrusion into privacy of Homeland Security has cast a quelling chill on the ability of the American people to pursue dreams and create wealth.

If Pres. Bush wants to ‘stimulate the economy’, he could do no better than to 1) identify tax reduction loopholes available to corporations such as market through Wal-Mart; 2) Simplify the tax code by ending those evasive (and expensive to the consumer) loopholes; 3) reduce corporate tax rates to amount to a 1% overall reduction in revenue from corporations.

Paul Harvey proved to my satisfaction many years ago, that corporations do not pay taxes – they collect them. By reducing taxes collected by even a slight amount from corporations, you increase profit margins (that is, payouts to stock holders), and reduce product costs. By restructuring the tax-evasive provisions of the revenue code, you reduce, often significantly, the cost to the corporation (cost of producing product) of tracking all the revenue code provisions, and reduce the direct costs of taking advantage of those provisions.

Instead, the Democrats expect to buy votes, by handing out cash so most families will be able to pay off a couple of overdue bills. This is good for people, but doesn’t actually help the economy much. And the tactic does distract voters from looking closely at how the Democrats tend to overspend to pay for vote-raising schemes, causing many of the credit and exhausted-resource crises.

Has anyone asked the Democratic Congress how they are progressing, at paying down the National Debt? Think how much less foreign ownership in America would be an issue, if most of the National Debt weren’t owned overseas. And if much of the credit potential of the US economy weren’t tied up in our National Debt.

My cat food has gone from $7.97 to $10.20, Beanee Weanees from $0.48 to $0.64 in the last six months. I am not out on the streets, like at Haiti, but I can see that inflation (money has less value for buying food and other staples) is here, big time. President Reagan in the 1980′s brought the Democratic economic debacle of Jimmy Carter’s days – remember common loan rates at 25%, and the Iranian hostages held 444 days until Reagan’s inauguration into office? – down to the 0.4% we enjoyed until this Democratic Congress disrupted the steady growth. (I contend the single success of the Clinton presidency was that he left Reagan’s economic policies, as Pres. Bush senior did before him, in place and unmolested.)

Just for a glimpse of the scale of things, Helen Waller quotes an Earth Policy Institute article, “Supermarkets and Service Stations Now Competing for Grain” as reporting:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that world grain use will grow by 20 million tons in 2006. Of this, 14 million tons will be used to produce fuel for cars in the United States, leaving only 6 million tons to satisfy the world’s growing food needs.

In agricultural terms, the world appetite for automotive fuel is insatiable. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year. The grain it takes to fill the tank every two weeks over a year will feed 26 people.

If we each sent someone in Haiti a picture, of us filling our gas tank with 10% ethanol fuel, would that make them feel happier about where the food went?

Realistically? Ethanol was a sensational exploitation of unsound popular economics and science (similar, in my mind to the Kyoto Accord tree huggers. I think replanting old growth forests will be one of the most effective ways to restore environmental equilibrium, but that isn’t what tree huggers concern themselves with.) When we were talking about using unused farmland to produce the ethanol, without diverting land or resources from producing livestock feed and food for the table, then ethanol was a clear win for the farming country. Then the politicians wanted some benefits, and that takes subsidies, and suddenly food growers make more money taking subsidies and growing ethanol products.

And let us not forget the seed companies, with their proprietary market restrictions. Because they now call their product development – falsely or not – ‘genetic’ development, they ‘patent’ their seeds. In the last three years it has become a federal crime to replant the grain you harvested last season, or to plant grain not directly from a patent or license holder. One seed company successfully sued their neighbor. It seems that the wind blew some of the seed company’s wheat over the fence into the neighbor’s field, where it grew intermingled in the neighbor’s crop. The seed company successfully got the courts to agree, that however it got there, the seed company still owned all the seed from their research – including forbidding the neighbor from planting the now-contaminated product.

My neighbor wanted to plant oats here in North Central Oklahoma this year. There isn’t any seed. Grain elevators are forbidden to sell seed grains (federal crime again, protecting the seed companies’ copyrights). All grain seed cost, not managed by a few monopolies, have skyrocketed in cost and dropped in availability. Which increases the cost of raising grains.

Maybe we should print out the patents and copyrights ConAgra, Pioneer Seed, and the other major seed companies, and send those to the hungry people in Haiti. And explain, “See, we protect the rights of these corporations! No, we couldn’t actually raise crops this year, again, we couldn’t afford it. Sorry.”

And lastly, Brazil. That paragon of Global Warming alarmists. Almost entirely on ethanol, now. How much has devastating the once-immense Amazon rain forest cost the globe, in droughts, shutting down the Gulf Stream that used to protect the weather of much of Northern Europe? And what about the ethanol Brazil burns, that could have fed the people of Haiti?