Pete, Thanks for your reply. My vision for mostly public campaign funding would not encounter at least two of the three problems you describe (re: First Amendment and re: wealthy candidates). Re: "First, the Supreme Court would knock it down for violating the Free Speech protections of the First Amendment. There would be no First Amendment violation. First, my suggested system would be voluntary. Second, we could just greatly increase the matching multiple, say providing $10 in public funds for every $1 raised privately (with limits on individual contributions) as long as the campaign stayed within the spending cap. And the spending cap would be set high enough that no candidate other than a billionaire would opt out. Which leads me to... Re: "Second, it would reward independently wealthy candidates." Any candidate staying within the public funding system could receive additional funds to match his opponent's spending if the opponent exceeds the system's spending cap, thus removing any advantage to the wealthy candidate (and probably preventing him from spending more anyway, since he would know that it would not provide such an advantage). Re: "whichever party controlled the Congress and the White House when the formula for determining the funding levels would set the formula to put the other party's candidate out of business." This one may be a concern, but perhaps the system could be relatively simple and uncontroversial enough to gain strong public support, and in turn sufficient pressure on Congress, even if it might benefit one party a bit more than another. If we say, just for example, $10 in public dollars per $1 raised privately, either with some cap on individual contributions, ideally some amount that a middle-class person might be able to afford (e.g, $200) or with no lowering of that individual cap if agreement on that point is too much of an obstacle to a deal. By the way, I'd like to see the amount of public funding provided be quite large, so campaigns have enough to fight against "independent expenditures" by third parties. I'd be glad to see taxpayers fund several billions of dollars of campaign spending each cycle, because it would be the best investment taxpayers have ever made due to savings from reduction/elimination of subsidies, import quotas, special tax breaks, etc., not to mention the benefit of a more representative democracy.

typo: Should have read "switching from soy to corn"

FYI re: corn and soy http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/opinion/19wed1.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=corn+soy+ethanol&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Minnesota Mom, I think I misread/misinterpreted what you said above. I thought you were saying that the switch by some farmers from soy to corn was just normal, appropriate crop rotation. Sorry if I misunderstood.

Oh, and that increased meat consumption refers to increases mainly from China and India as the middle class in those nations grows and meat becomes a larger portion of their diets.

And local crop failures. My question, though, is: how do we tease out the relative importance of the different factors? Ethanol subsidies were IMO a no-brainer from the get-go, since it was clear from the beginning that they required so much energy input as to be little, if any, better than energy break-even. Add to that the effect on food supply, and it looks crazier and crazier. No doubt we'll hear lots of "who could have predicted?" excuses, but plenty of people did predict. So another form of my question: say that Congress by some political miracle does The Right Thing and rationalizes our biofuel policy (yeah, election year, midwest, ADM, right). But if such a miracle were to happen, how big would the impact be on food prices at the commodity level? Or at least: how would we go about figuring that out? (BTW, it'll be yet another miracle if I manage to get this posted; the captha is incomprehensible.)