When a Republican primary debate turns to charges of undue corporate influence, we pay attention. When a conservative lawmaker lays out a populist message grounded in conservative principles, we hope the rest of the GOP is listening, too.
Last week, Florida gubernatorial candidates Rep. Ron DeSantis (who represents Florida’s 6th Congressional District) and Adam Putnam (Florida’s agriculture commissioner) faced off in a Republican debate. Things got feisty.
“Adam,” DeSantis said, “is basically the errand boy for U.S. sugar. He is going to stand with them, time and time again. He is going to give them everything they want.”
The immediate topic was Big Sugar’s pollution of Florida’s water supply — their fertilizers cause damaging and ugly algae blooms downstream — but DeSantis’s critique goes deeper. The most relevant policy difference between Putnam and DeSantis is the twisted web of quotas, subsidies, and bailouts that make up the federal sugar program.
DeSantis takes the side of less government and more free markets. Putnam takes the side of Big Sugar.
The sugar program begins with import quotas. The U.S. government vastly limits how much sugar American grocers and foodmakers can import from each country. This artificially suppressed supply yields sugar prices in the U.S. far higher than in the rest of the world. This impoverishes U.S. consumers, but it also kills jobs among foodmakers, who move to Canada and Mexico where they can buy sugar at relatively free-market prices.
Then, there are the loan guarantees. Sugar processors get to borrow from the USDA against their sugar — about 24 cents per pound. These are nonrecourse loans, meaning that if the per-pound price somehow falls below 24 cents, refiners just forfeit their sugar to the USDA and keep the “loan” money.
Big Sugar enjoys plenty of other subsidies, too. It adds up to a massive and indefensible corporate welfare boondoggle that hurts consumers and foodmakers in order to benefit a handful of politically powerful companies, mostly in Florida.
The political clout of Big Sugar is famous (or infamous) down in the Sunshine State, which is why DeSantis’s attack struck a chord. It’s also why DeSantis’s stance is so cheering. Here is a conservative standing up for free enterprise in the face of an industry accustomed to getting its way from Republicans who purport to believe in capitalism, and Democrats who claim they oppose Polluting Big Businesses.
Out of Florida’s 27 members of Congress — 16 Republicans and 11 Democrats — only three voted earlier this year for a farm bill amendment that would have reformed the sugar program and mitigated its damaging subsidies. DeSantis was one of those three.
Putnam, meanwhile, is a fierce defender of the sugar program and a major recipient of Big Sugar’s contributions throughout his political career. Putnam has received more than $800,000 directly from sugar companies so far in this primary, and more than $7.5 million from sugar-funded PACs, the Miami Herald reported. That’s about 20 percent of all his funding.
This has been the story his whole career. In Putnam’s first congressional election, Flo-Sun (the sugar company owned by the Fanjul sugar dynasty) was his top source of money, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
All that sugar money has helped Putnam through his career. Now that sugar money is becoming a negative, even in the GOP primaries.
If DeSantis wins while running against Big Sugar, it will be a replay of the Iowa caucuses when Ted Cruz won while running against the ethanol mandate.
DeSantis, like Cruz, is offering an argument all Republicans should pay attention to these days. By battling corporate welfare and special interests, this argument combines the populism of the Trump era with the free-enterprise principles of conservatism. DeSantis is calling out the special interests in the literal swamps of South Florida.
And it seems to be working: DeSantis’s attack on Big Sugar in last week’s debate got the loudest ovation of the night.
We add our own three cheers for free-market populism.
