Rural subsidies

This ought to be cause for celebration:  New York state is closing some low- and medium-security prisons because it doesn't have enough felons:

On Jan. 11, the Spitzer administration announced plans to close Camp Gabriels, two other corrections camps and a medium-security prison, all of which have been operating below capacity since 1996 because of a decline in the number of nonviolent felons, the state’s corrections commissioner, Brian Fischer, said.

Closing those prisons, Mr. Fischer said, would save the state millions of dollars, free up money for the treatment of sex offenders and mentally ill inmates, and finance programs like anger management and vocational training, meant to prepare prisoners for their release.

But New York has used prisons as a kind of rural subsidy (as has Texas), which has left some little towns hooked on prison jobs and prison labor.  For example, "Camp" Gabriels, one of the prisons slated to close, employs 136 people in sparsely populated Franklin.  Predictably:

[s]mall businesses have staked their survival on the prison workers who patronize their stores. Local governments and charities, meanwhile, have come to depend on inmate work crews to clear snow from fire hydrants, maintain parks and hiking trails, mow the lawns at cemeteries and unload trucks at food pantries. . . .

“All those services, when you put that into dollars, there’s no way we’d be able to hire people to perform them,” said Mary Ellen Keith, supervisor of the town of Franklin, which relies on the crews to cut overgrown brush from the sides of 67 miles of local roads, among other tasks.

The locals, prison workers and unions are organizing a campaign to save the prisons.  It's only a matter of time before they figure out that the solution is to increase the demand for what they're selling.  Mete out stiffer sentences for recreational drug users, for example.  Jail parking ticket scofflaws.  Or just criminalize can-kicking.

I shouldn't make fun of them.  This will be a wrenching change for these little towns.  Had they not landed the prisons in the first place, they likely would have experienced a gradual decline stretched out over a couple of decades.  Now that decline will be compressed into a few months.

But if it is possible to muster indignity over a prison closure, just think how it will be when the government eventually realizes that ethanol subsidies are just an environment-wrecking, food-price-spiking, corporate-welfare boondoggle.

Ethanol plants are being built like crazy all over the mid-west.  Each little town, I'm sure, is touting its ethanol plant as the way out of oblivion.  And each little town is staking its future on the intricate web of price supports, tax credits and loan guarantees that makes ethanol plants economically viable. 

Some of these little towns have little future to stake, I suppose.  Without the ethanol plants, they would simply dry up and blow away.  That's sad.  We should be leery of getting them hooked on ethanol, though.  A gradual decline is not as bad as the catastophic disruption they will suffer when their ethanol economies are suddenly cut off from their ethanol-enabling subsidies.

My big fear is that we won't cut them off; we will stick ourselves with these monumentally wasteful subsidies forever in order to sustain their ethanol-dependent economies.  New York is again a good lesson: Governor Pataki tried to close prisons in upstate New York four years in a row.  He failed each time. 

Comments

[M1EK]

Be ready; the Texas version of this is coming too - biodiesel. Almost as bad of an economic case as ethanol; a worse environmental case; but hey, Willie likes it, and it can go right into our old diesels, so it must be good, right?

[Matt Turner]

This is one issue it looks like Mike, you, and myself are all in agreement on. I mean if we all agree that bio-fuels are bad all round then why is it soooooo hard for others to understand it?

As for the prison issue, I get annoyed with how quickly something like having prison jobs or subsidies of any kind(welfare) stop being considered a privilege and become a right. While I feel for the people in those small towns, the rest of the state should not be subsidizing their living, without a reason for such a subsidy. I'm glad you posted this.

[AC]

I have trouble understanding the ethanol subsidies too. They're opposed by environmentalists, libertarians, food/hunger activists, small-government conservatives, economists and (presumably) big oil and car companies. I guess the farm lobby is really just that powerful, plus the public has been sold on some mythical notion of "energy independence."

[M1EK]

No, the big car companies love them - the big US companies, anyways, because there's a CAFE exemption for ethanol which makes it pure gold. Basically you get to pretend your crappy SUV mileage is double if it runs on E85.

[AC]

Good point. But that's a new CAFE provision, right? Ethanol subsidies have been in place for years. Why would they have supported them before the new CAFE?

[Matt Turner]

Probably for the court of public opinion. So many people believe that anything is better than petroleum fuels. They don't even realize that e-85 is subsidized more than probably any other product and still is pretty much only 20cents cheaper than Gas at the pump (which is only because the federal tax subsidy). But when you take into account the decreased gas mileage is actually more expensive than gas.

But GMC got to claim that it was more environmentally friend in the news and on ads and so that's what they cared most about. Really I’m sure the conversation went:
"So how do we appear Greener without giving up our bread and butter SUVs?"
"Umm I heard of this e85 stuff I think our truck will run on."
"Let's move with that Marketing"

Really the green movement like it or not is based on people wanting to feel like they're doing something instead of knowing they are. I mean if they wanted to know they were then people would ride bikes to work like I do when I can. I mean I don't tend to eat more when I ride, so there's no increase in energy consumption there. I may breathe more so I guess a little more CO2, but that's negligible comparing to what my truck puts out for the same drive.

But see that like public transportation is inconvenient so most will still get in their cars and drive. I mean when I worked at 100 congress I'd see people go get in their cars to go three blocks because it was 90+ degrees. Yet these same people want to feel green, so that's what the auto manufactures are playing to. Much like iPod commercials play to be an individual. When in reality there are better mp3 players and if you bought one of them you'd be different than the iPod mass you see on the green belt. But you still see people buying iPods to feel like an individual, even though it has the opposite effect.

Ok I'm done with your soapbox, sorry you can have it back.