Sugar subsidies are a symptom of a much larger problem:

Protectionism is always a reverse–Robin Hood proposition. Farm protections force the poor to pay artificially higher food prices in order to pad profits for millionaire farmers. And the poor never even realize that they’re basically being defrauded by a conspiracy of government officials and their favorite special interests. When properly understood in their true economic light, these farm supports (like the abominable Wright Amendment for American Airlines) are tantamount to government collusion in a criminal price-fixing cartel. Contrary to what is an almost biblical tenet of progressivism, government cannot sanitize a price-fixing cartel. Government power can only make the cartel’s injury to the public far worse, both by protecting the cartel from the competition that would bring it down in a truly free market, and by making the cartel permanent. It is no surprise that the New Deal’s agriculture supports were foisted on the American public as emergency measures, but are still with us today.

They’re very pernicious.

His proposals have been and will continue to be disastrous for the economy, and for the middle and working class:

Unfortunately, our visionary President knows little of the unintended consequences of legal intervention, so he continues to push hard on policies that fail. But he accuses everyone who disagrees with him of a form of “collective amnesia.” He caricatures them as believing that “we are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.” Both halves of that sentence grossly mischaracterize the opposition.

He’s the king of straw men.

[Update a while later]

“Income inequality,” the biggest lie of all.

[Early afternoon update]

The dishonesty of Obama’s income-inequality speech.

Remember how we were told that the GM bailout would be paid back to the taxpayer?

Well, we just took a ten-billion-dollar bath. As noted there, we’ll never know what useful things might have been done with that ten billion.