West Des Moines, Iowa — Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani made his way through the shops on Fifth Street in historic Valley Junction (the fancy name for the rapidly growing town of West Des Moines) in the cold early evening hours on Wednesday night.
A mob of staffers trailed him along with some reporters looking for atmospherics with which to frame an article on that day’s debates (or with which to lead a column on Iowa’s political clout). Actual West Des Moinesians were unimpressed.
Happy-hour denizens of the 5th Street Pub knew that America’s Mayor was right outside in an Irish collectibles store, but the patrons stayed put on their barstools. Up and down the street, the locals’ attitude was the same: Let him come to us. Iowans are so sought out by politicians that most of them play the role of the prettiest girl at the dance and passively receive their suitors.
The shop owners, of course, are thrilled, because Rudy, Barack, Hillary and the rest are sure to buy something they don’t really want. The owners of the 5th Street Pub don’t mind the added business of traveling journalists looking for warmth and willing to buy drinks for any local who will discuss his caucus thoughts.
While Iowa’s economic benefits from having the first-in-the-nation caucuses may be concentrated in the few months before every fourth January, they are hardly limited to that time or to Historic Valley Junction’s merchants.
Federal subsidies for ethanol, with their costs to taxpayers, drivers, ranchers and food shoppers, might not exist if the nation’s leading politicians didn’t need to come to the Hawkeye State every four years and win over voters, local politicians, county chambers of commerce and farm bureaus.
Washington subsidizes ethanol by granting a special 51-cent per gallon tax credit to gas stations or other blenders when they blend ethanol with gasoline. It also protects corn growers and ethanol distillers in Iowa and throughout the United States by slapping a 54-cent tariff on every gallon of ethanol imported into the country. Those are the biggest subsidies, but there are many others.
You can’t blame Iowans that much. The federal welfare state has many clients, and Iowa is leveraging its power to get a healthy share of the handouts. The blame falls on the politicians who convert to the religion of ethanol on the road to Des Moines.
In June2004, members of the Greater Des Moines Area Partnership, a group of local business and political leaders, came to Washington and met with Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the Greater Tulsa Area Partnership could have gotten a meeting with the senator. While Clinton used the meeting to attack President Bush’s tax cuts, an early question got to the point: Why did she vote in 2003 against the renewable fuels mandate that would spur ethanol use?
Caught off guard, she answered that it would increase costs for drivers, but she promised to read a new ethanol-industry study. This year, her recently released energy plan calls for increasing the renewable fuels mandate by about 25 percent, and she voted to preserve the tariff on imported ethanol. So much for those drivers’ pocketbooks.
Clinton is hardly the only politician to convert on ethanol once the Iowa caucuses loomed. Former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., once called ethanol subsidies “highway robbery,” but at a 2000 debate in Des Moines just before the caucuses, he pledged allegiance to the subsidies.
It doesn’t end with ethanol. According to theTax Foundation, Iowa receives $1.10 in federal spending for every dollar its citizens pay in taxes, despite the fact the state’s median household income is above the nation’s average, according to the Census Bureau.
Iowa is a lovely place, and the importance of the caucuses forces candidates to personally impress voters — thus rewarding sincerity and diminishing the importance of huge campaign coffers. It all has some very salutary effects on the process of choosing our presidential candidates.
But with our government so entrenched in the business of picking winners and losers in our economy, an inevitable curse of the caucuses is turning political clout into economic gain — at the expense of taxpayers in the other 49 states.
Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney is senior reporter for the Evans-Novak Political Report. His Examiner column appears on Fridays.
