The Three Little Pigs Meet Government

Glenn Beck inspired me to write my own fairy tale about the three pigs.

A week before, a hurricane destroyed the first little piggy’s home in which he had barely been able to make payments, much less buy expensive federal flood insurance. Once the water receded he began to gather piles of straw that had been left scattered by the storm. He used that straw to construct a small comfortable home. He was proud of his little house and found it to be very dry when it rained, and warm on cold nights. Even though it wasn’t near as nice as the home destroyed by the storm, he was happy and there were no monthly payments.

One day the piggy had just come home from work when there was a knock on the straw door. He opened it to find a man wearing a suit and a frown on his fat face. The man asked unpleasantly, “Is this your straw house?”

The pig, proud of all his hard work, squared his shoulders, and replied, “It sure is, built it myself.”

The man pushed the pig out of the way and began looking around the small straw house. He stopped, began writing on a sheet of paper, and said, “This house doesn’t meet our stringent hurricane building codes. If we were to have a hurricane this house would be destroyed.”

2013 EPA RFS: The road to starvation

The EPA has finished finalizing the 2013 Renewable Fuel Standards(RFS). The biggest of those changes is to increase Ethanol content in gasoline. The current standard  requires all gasoline have at least 10% Ethanol. The new standard will raise this to 15%, and will now also include diesels.

Under the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007, the RFS program was expanded in several key ways:

• EISA expanded the RFS program to include diesel, in addition to gasoline;
• EISA increased the volume of renewable fuel required to be blended into transportation fuel from 9 billion gallons in 2008 to 36 billion gallons by 2022;
• EISA established new categories of renewable fuel, and set separate volume requirements for each one.
• EISA required EPA to apply lifecycle greenhouse gas performance threshold standards to ensure that each category of renewable fuel emits fewer greenhouse gases than the petroleum fuel it replaces.
  

The source for most of this Ethanol is soybean and corn—two main staples of our food supply. Each of those can be found in many of the processed foods we eat. Because of the USA's abundance of accessible fertile lands we produce much of the world's supply of food.