Corn Syrup and Electoral Votes

On the chance that people are still checking this blog out occasionally and hoping someone's posted something new I thought I'd post something new.

This is a re-post of something I just posted in another IHS blog, for the the folks at the Liberty, Art, and Culture seminar this past summer. It's my own crazy theory and I'd be interested to see what some of you economist think about it. The state of farming in the U.S. is something I plan on doing a lot of further research on.




I've just spent the last week camping, (post on the national parks system possibly coming eventually), with a group of friends of mine from England. At some point they asked me why so much of our food has corn syrup listed as the first ingredient.

Here's my theory:

Presidential electoral math.

First, of course, I had to explain how the electoral vote system works, with each state getting a group of electoral votes bases on the number of Representatives plus two for each of their senators and whatever candidate wins most of the votes within the state wins all of the state's electoral votes and therefore they only focus on the swing states. (Then I went off on a tangent about how California is a tenth of the population of the US but only gets attention when the candidates want money, this is worthy of it's own post, but I'll hold off until later).

The problem with this is that because of the two senator electoral votes it's the less populated states that matter more. Additionally it's those less populated states that are easier to put into swing from one election to another.

And it just so happens that many of those less populated swing states are ones where farming is one of the major industries, Ohio, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania.

Add farming's historical importance in American history and the theory that's it's better to have too much food than too little and you come up with a situation in which farmers are given so much attention, subsidies and assistance that we end up with more corn than we know what to do with. This drives down the price of corn, making it easily accessible for food manufacturers to throw it in to nearly everything we eat without raising the cost of the food they're making.


This is all of course, all too straight forward to be completely true, but I'm sticking with it for now, despite the fact that I don't have any immediate data accessible to back it up. Eventually I'm planning on doing a bunch of research into the American farming industry, but in the meantime I'd love to hear the IHS collective's views on this theory.


**As a side note I'll just point out that New Mexico and Vermont(?) don't award all their electoral votes to just one candidate. I wish California would follow their lead although I disagree with the way they do decide who gets how many votes. I'll probably post something about this as we get closer to the election and I get more and more frustrated by politicking.