Food Prices: McCain Lies About Obama’s Position

Don Pedro listened to McCain’s “horrendous” speech last night so we don’t have to:

At one point in the speech McCain said, “Sen. Obama supports the tariffs that have led to rising grocery bills for American families.” This is wrong on two points. First, Obama doesn’t support any such tariffs that I know of, although I imagine someone in the McCain campaign would try to argue (falsely) that Obama’s criticism of particular aspects of trade agreements means that he supports food tariffs. More importantly, no one thinks tariffs are behind the increase in food prices. As Obama noted in an interview a few weeks ago, there are many factors behind the rise in food prices. These include rising oil prices (which affect fertilizer and tranports costs), poor harvests this year in a few countries, rising demand in Asia, and the rising demand for biofuels, which has been driven by subsidies in the U.S. and elsewhere. I’ve read many studies on this topic in recent months, and no one has suggested that food prices in the U.S. have increased because of U.S. tariffs.

Don makes two important points about how McCain has been running his campaign: (1) McCain has often flat out lied in his pathetic attempts to attack Obama; and (2) McCain generally has no clue as to what is going on with respect to important policy issues.