Obama taps another corporate-welfare king in Vilsack
By: Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist
December 19, 2008
Americans with a good memory—and who didn’t blink—will remember that former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack ran for president in this past election. In fact, he was the first candidate to formally announce.
So technically, by choosing Vilsack as Agriculture secretary, Obama has tapped yet another vanquished presidential competitor for his cabinet, burnishing the image the media loves of his building a “team of rivals.”
But there is another trend emerging regarding Obama’s top picks: expertise in doling out corporate welfare. Tom Vilsack joins the Obama administration as another corporate welfare maven—and I’m not just talking about ethanol.
When people think “Iowa” and “agriculture policy” their thoughts immediately race to corn ethanol. Indeed, Vilsack was a big booster of ethanol in his two terms as governor, a fact that has caused some foodies and liberals to feel betrayed by Obama’s picking him as Agriculture secretary.
American Prospect blogger Ezra Klein wrote when Vilsack’s name was first floated last month, “Anyone who cares about food policy, or who was excited by Barack Obama’s offhand reference to Michael Pollan's food policy manifesto, should be extremely skeptical of this pick.”
It was a nice embodiment of Obama’s transition from Hope-Changing candidate to president who actually implements policy. Yes, candidate Obama is savvy enough to make an offhand reference to a thoughtful and important food writer, but also Obama has long been an unapologetic advocate of expanding ethanol subsidies, far beyond where they stand today.
One of Obama’s favorite attacks on the campaign trail was hitting McCain for repeatedly voting against renewable fuels—he was attacking McCain, in part, for opposing ethanol subsidies.
Obama pushed bills to increase the mandate on ethanol, even as U.S. farmers couldn’t keep pace with the current ethanol mandate—hardly promoting sustainable agriculture. On the day in 2005 that Obama voted twice to increase ethanol mandates, liberal Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York attacked the massive government support for ethanol “a boondoggle because it takes money out of the pockets of drivers and puts it into the pockets of the big ethanol producers…. Make no mistake about it, most of those billions will not go to the family farmer, they will go to the Archer Daniels Midlands of the world.”
Ethanol subsidies are destructive corporate welfare, and Obama has long backed them. He even proposed in his campaign to outlaw the manufacture of new cars that cannot run on E-85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. You can expect him to insert this mandate as a condition on the bailout money for Detroit. Now he has chosen an ethanol governor as his agriculture secretary.
There is hope, though. Just as Obama moderated his ethanol talk after winning the Iowa caucuses, Vilsack, since leaving Iowa and trying to enter the national stage, has started sounding far more sensible on ethanol—admitting that corn ethanol is not the answer for energy security or reducing greenhouse gases. He acknowledged that if ethanol is so good, maybe the U.S. should drop its tariff on imported ethanol.
Giving the not-yet-sworn-in president the benefit of the doubt, we can hold out hope that he and Vilsack might reform our ethanol program.
But looking at Vilsack’s broader record and its similarities to the record of Bill Richardson, Obama’s Commerce Department pick, Team Obama is showing a real eagerness to hand taxpayer money to big corporations who will help advance the politicians’ goals.
Vilsack was once named the “Governor of the Year,” by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), who lauded Vilsack’s program “Iowa 2010.” “Iowa 2010” was basically a piggy bank of grants and loans for high-tech companies.
Vilsack saw that Iowa was not attracting many great employers, but rather than undertake tax or regulatory reform to remove government obstacles to doing business in Iowa, he created a piggy-bank of handouts.
Richardson, as this column showed earlier this month, was similarly a big fan of “public-private partnerships.”
If you see beyond the overly simple label of Left and Right or anti-business and pro-business, you can make out a nascent pattern in this administration. They don’t hold the anti-corporate bias many of their crunchier supporters do, and they have no compunction using regulation, taxes, and spending to mould our society.
The result is a big-business–big-government partnership where taxpayers are the patrons, and would-be-entrepreneurs are the victims.
Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney is editor of the Evans-Novak Political Report. His Examiner column appears on Fridays.
