Tom Coburn wrote an op-ed on our pages yesterday about his bill to repeal one of the many subsidies for ethanol. I wanted to register my agreement with Coburn’s essay, even though it was written as a rebuttal of my blog post earlier this week.

I had pointed out that the specific ethanol subsidy Coburn’s bill targets is a tax credit. In a sense, the bill is a tax hike. But Coburn has an important response to this with two dimensions: