As if things could not get worse, they are getting worse for sugar. Little do most voters know that sugar has a cost in the USA much higher than on the world market. I am not going to go into the history of how we got here, but I can tell you that we have dug another deep hole and it is in sugar. For years, there has been a "mandate" that restricted the importation of sugar. This was to protect the poor sugar farmers. Of all farmers in the USA, the sugar farmers are the largest and I can tell you for a fact that these farmers do "not" drive tractors. It is more like jet planes. The price of sugar has been going down due to an over supply here in the USA. That sounds good, but there has been an over supply around the world at even cheaper prices for years, but us tax payers can not tap into that. We have to buy USA sugar at the worlds highest prices. Most of you did not know that. You are getting screwed by something very sweet, sugar. Here are a few numbers.
Go to you local market and see what a 5# or 10# bag of sugar costs. If you buy the 10# bag, it is easier to figure out how much a pound costs. It has been as high as 50 cents a pound, but is coming down and it is coming down very slowly. The commodity price of sugar is now down to just 18 cents a pound, but still above the world price. Candy anyplace in the world has a lower cost than here. If you look at the figures coming out of Washington DC, you will not see a big dollar item for sugar price support. Why is that? It is because the cost is a "mandated" in the retail price for you and me. We pay more and in Washington DC, it looks like the government is not spending a dime. What we need is a number from Washington DC that shows the true cost of the sugar support "mandate", and any other mandate, for that matter. This type of thing is going on all over Washington DC and it is the same with both parties. No one is reporting on the cost of "mandates". It is like "funny money", but wait.
Sugar does have a price support number and that is about 21 cents a pound. As long as the price in the USA stays above 21 cents, Washington DC does not owe any farmer anything. If the price goes below the price support level, then us tax payers have to pick up the tab for the difference. That is how it works. It just happens that the amount of sugar produced here in the USA has increased significantly in the past few years. Cheap money means that farmers can borrow cheap and plant more. This is great for the farmers because if their extra production causes the prices to go down, they are protected by us stupid tax payers so they can't lose. Nice racket if you can get it.
It is not a lot different from the housing melt down or the student loan melt down. It is like when you cosign a note for a cousin and your cousin skips out. In this case, it is us tax payers who cosigned the notes. Now, why did all this happen? That is the real question. Some where some time back a mentally retarded politician got the idea to become "sell sufficient" with regards sugar. It is just like the morons who now want to be "energy independent". We can become energy independent just like we have with sugar and the end results will be exactly the same. We have the highest prices in the world for sugar and we will soon have the highest prices in the world for energy. Don't think so? If you are one of those "one movers" who I blog about, you will not understand the above and will still be on the band wagon calling for "energy Independence" (no matter what is costs). We can do it just like we did with sugar, but what do you think will happen in the end? I rest my case.
