Now that the government has succeeded in putting corn flakes in everyone's gas tank, let's see what really happened.

When you take away the food (34 percent of the U.S. corn production) from the chickens, cows and pigs ... and give it to the ethanol producers, along with a 51 cent per gallon subsidy, ($ 4.5 billion paid by U.S. taxpayers), here is what really happens.

First, you have to pick the corn and ship it to the newly built distilling plants to turn it into ethanol. That requires fuel to ship the corn.

The processing of corn to ethanol is called distilling. It requires more than one gallon of oil fuel and 1,700 gallons of water to end up with one gallon of ethanol. Then you have to ship the ethanol by truck, tanker or train since it is too corrosive to go into a pipe line. That uses more fuel.

To grow the corn, each acre required 130 pounds of nitrogen and 55 pounds of phosphorus for fertilizing, which has to be shipped to the farms and spread out, requiring more fuel.

Since there is an unlimited demand for corn, with a floor on the price, a guaranteed profit and no risk, farmers are shifting to grow corn instead of wheat, rice and other grains. With less wheat and rice, it leads to shortages and increases the

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costs of bread and cereals to consumers and feed to the ranchers and farmers, so the price of beef, pork, chicken, eggs, etc., had to go up. And as everyone knows, it did, leading to inflation and food shortages.

Since ethanol has less energy than gasoline, when you mix it in with the gasoline, you finally get it to the pump and get 30 percent fewer miles per gallon from the fuel than you could have gotten if they just put the gallon of fuel in your car in the first place, instead of making ethanol.

We are now paying $4 a gallon for diluted gasoline that gives us fewer mpg, at the same time that the government is chiding the auto manufacturers to increase mpg.

In the end, we have succeeded in wasting billions of gallons of water, lowering fuel efficiency of cars, trucks, trains and planes, doubling the cost and creating shortages, of rice, wheat, eggs and meat, while lowering the mpg of our vehicles and creating all sorts of pollution with the extraneous energy utilization.

We would have been better off just eating the corn, drinking the water and using the original fuel in our cars. (If we just ate the corn, we could provide 2,000 calories of carbs every day for 104 million people. That is one-third of the U.S. population.)

Then we could rebate the $4.5 billion to all the Americans who paid taxes to pay for the gasoline they use and lower the cost of food as well.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama still support ethanol sub­sidies. John McCain does not.

In 1912, Ludwig von Mises, an economist in Europe, wrote, "Socialists promise you the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office."

Jerry Simon, Stamford