SWEETS TO THE SWEET: BANNING JUNK FROM THE LONE STAR

By Juan Montoya It's always amazing to me the mischievousness that emerges when the Texas Legislature meets for its bienial frenzy. In the past we've had bills calling for the naming of the possum the official state marsupial, contending that it's the most maligned animal on the continent, naming David Crockett as the official ghost of Texas, etc. This time around it's no different. Sen. Eddie Lucio is calling for a tax on every ounce of sugar in a soft drink as a way to drink ourselves out of a fat budget deficit and a lean treasury while at the same time striking a blow against obesity. Kind of like drinking ourselves into liquidity. This effort at multi-tasking, apparently, is good public reflations but will probably go to the trash heap of bills with good intentions and foolish notions. Now we have State Rep. Richard Raymond Peña of Laredo filing a bill that bans the purchase of junk food and sugar products by recipients of the Lone Star food stamp card. This will save no money, but if the state, Peña deduces, can hold the Lone Star card at recipients' heads, they will be the healthier for it. We won't say this is misguided , but if the well-meaning rep will do his homework he will discover that sugar products were banned from food stamp purchases not that long ago. However, the sugar growers lobby used its considerable clout and changed the rules to include the industry in its agriculture support program and sweetened the pie to include sugar products. If Lucio, Peña, or even our new congressman Blake Farenthold want to make cuts in the federal (and state) governments and shift it over to the deficit, why not eliminate the millions that we give gentlemen farmers of Santa Rosa and the other sugar-growers across the county who, like the angora goat growers in San Angelo, are producing a product made obsolete by a changing technology? The Angora goat growers were subsidized during the war when their product was needed to clothe the troops (notably airmen) during World War II. Congress enacted loan and price support programs for wool and mohair in 1954 and evne though the U.S. military adopted uniforms made of synthetic fibers, the U.S. government continued to provide subsidies to mohair producers until 1995, when the subsidies were "eliminated effective with the marketing year ending December 31, 1995. So were the sugar growers. They had the congress erect a barrier wall to keep out cheaper foreign sugar and set quotas on sugar from other contries to protect them. As a result, conmsumers here pay more for sugar than in any other country. Over time, after synthetic materials replaced wool, the goat growers fought hoof and nail to keep the subsidies and price supports until it became ludicrous to the majority of the country. Likewise, with artificial sweeteners now readily available without the need to subsidize the redundant sugar industry here and across the country, it would be more worthwhile for our worthy legislators to trim the fat from subsidies to these sugar-support programs instead of worrying that the poor on food stamps will buy a Baby Ruth or a bag of chips.