And for the victim to receive an award of 2 million dollars is absurd. Big awards, she says, stifle American business, in part because they induce soaring legal bills. No matter how the courts rule, business may see relief. Various bills in Congress would make enormous punitive damages, like the award Dr. Gore stands to earn, a thing of the past. I'm Philip Boroff for Marketplace.
Ethanol is an alternative fuel made from corn, which burns more cleanly than oil.
The ethanol subsidy is of special interest to one of the country's most politically-active companies, Archer Daniels Midland. Marketplace's Washington editor John Dimsdale reports. The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Bill Archer, gets credit for making some painful spending decisions in this year's budget. The oil industry considers the ethanol subsidy an unfair advantage for a competitor. According to Robert Shapiro of the Progressive Policy Institute, seventy-eight percent of the ethanol tax break goes to the world's largest producer of ethanol, Archer Daniels Midland Corporation, of Decatur Illinois.