If you’re like me and are trying to eat well in preparation for holiday indulgence, you know how difficult it is to truly avoid sugar. It is simply a part of the American diet, present in not just sweets but everything from bread to spaghetti sauce. For its seeming ubiquity, you might think sugar comes at a low price. But for taxpayers, that sweetness doesn’t come cheap.

For decades, domestic sugar producers have been protected from fair competition. In recent years, their influential lobby has ensured producers’ inflated profits through $260 million dollars’ worth of federal subsidies and restrictions on fairly priced imported sugar. That’s why a bipartisan group of 64 senators and representatives as diverse as John McCain and Elizabeth Warren are co-sponsoring the Sugar Policy Modernization Act, which aims to introduce market reforms into the industry and bring our outdated, Depression-era sugar policy into the 21st century.