Tea Party Rep Likes Wasteful Government -- Daily Intelligencer

Tea Party Rep Likes Wasteful Government -- Daily Intelligencer: Meanwhile, sugar subsidies are one of the oldest boondoggles in Washington, a combination of quotas limiting imports, price supports, and taxpayer-financed loans that boosts the price and profitability of the domestic sugar industry, which costs taxpayers more than a billion dollars a year. Despite lacking any public-policy merits whatsoever, the program survives with strong bipartisan support, ranging from Al Franken to Marco Rubio. The story ends on the comical note of quoting Florida Representative Ted Yoho, tea party maven and avowed enemy of big government, defending his strong advocacy of sugar subsidies: “I ran on limited government, fiscal responsibility and free enterprise, but when you’ve got programs that have been in place and it’s the accepted norm, to just go in there and stop it would be detrimental to our sugar growers.”