Heartland Shift, Eliminating the Buck & Crapo on Fuel

Heartland Shift, Eliminating the Buck & Crapo on Fuel

Heartland Shift, Eliminating the Buck & Crapo on Fuel plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

As mentioned yesterday, Idaho Senator Mike Crapo has co-sponsored two bills that seek to put the brakes on gas price hikes. One bill would stop plans by the EPA to move ahead with cap and tax regulations not approved by the Congress. 

CRAPO: The EPA is trying to end run Congress and this will result in an increase in energy taxes at a time when gasoline prices are already skyrocketing and may reach $4 a gallon soon. The Environmental Protection Agencies top-down regulatory approach is not the answer. The best way to convey that message is to ensure that this legislation makes its way to the President’s desk.

New census data is showing that America’s heartland, traditionally the Midwest region is shifting. The reason? Hispanic growth in the Southwest is not only changing politics but pulling more people to the west and in fact Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Idaho have surpassed the Midwest in population, according to 2010 figures.

Now a question for you. Could you live without the dollar bill? Once again the General Accounting Office is proposing to eliminate the paper dollar in favor of a dollar coin. It would save the U.S. roughly $5.5 billion dollars over the next 30 years. Of course to make the transition they would have to completely phase out the paper bill which they have not done in the past making a change nearly impossible. Would you be willing to change?

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

Perhaps Michael Pollan should actually interview someone who remembers the “good old days” of farming before he spouts his “misguided food nostalgia” tripe. They would likely inform him it wasn’t quite the simplistic and idyllic task that he makes it out to be. To hear Mr. Pollan tell it we should all be growing, harvesting, and producing our own farm to table food. But the industrial age of farming is not the picture of decline and destruction that he so often likes to paint it. Quite the contrary. If we were to return to Pollan’s fantasy of pre-industrial agriculture, there would likely be an extreme drop in the nation’s over all life expectancy; today we live longer and healthier lives due to our ability to have a wide and abundant variety of food at our disposal, thanks to decades of technological and innovative improvements in the ag industry. While Pollan likes to advise of “not eating anything our great or great-great grandmothers wouldn’t recognize as food”, truth is many things our great-greats ate we wouldn’t recognize as food! Let’s not replace more efficient and productive agriculture with one man’s unrealistic and flawed fantasy.

Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.

Previous ReportPutting the Brakes On & Moving Ahead on Korea
Next ReportPassing FTA's & Thank A Farmer