Corn ethanol tax credit: most expensive way to create jobs ever?

Today, in yet another example of ethanol industry spin, the Renewable Fuels Association released a state-by-state version of its highly inflated jobs study. This is just another part of big ethanol’s effort to make the case for extending the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC)—a massive, taxpayer-funded subsidy for corn ethanol—on top of both blending mandates under the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) and stiff border tariffs to protect domestic ethanol producers from foreign competition. I wrote yesterday about some of the reasons why the industry’s jobs numbers are way off, but given RFA’s release, it seems worth getting into more of the details.

There are three basic points here:

1. Inflated jobs multipliers: As I discussed yesterday, big ethanol is using wildly inflated job multipliers. For every direct job created at an ethanol plant, the industry group Growth Energy is claiming 31.5 additional new jobs are created throughout the economy. For studies that try to be realistic and specific about jobs in the ethanol industry, a multiplier of about 6 is aggressive. A job multiplier of 3-4 is much more realistic, especially since big ethanol claims to have little to no impact on food and feed production or prices and therefore cannot take credit for somehow magically creating thousands of corn growing jobs that would have existed anyway.
2. Inflated economic impact: To get to their inflated jobs numbers, big ethanol is also claiming that it will take a big economic hit from the loss of the VEETC and the associated import tariff. Unfortunately, they play fast and loose with the economics. (To get close to their numbers you have to assume that the industry is wildly uneconomic.) More on this below, but adjusting their numbers for a bit of reality and the hit is half to one quarter of what they claim. Estimates from the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) come in at about a quarter. That means the direct jobs impact is 1/4 of industry estimates even before we get to a more realistic jobs multiplier.
3. Just about any other use of $31 billion would create more jobs: If we start with a more realistic economic impact and the resulting, much smaller direct jobs impact and then use a more realistic jobs multiplier, we end up with a job impact of about two thousand. A five year extension of the VEETC will cost over $31 billion in taxpayer dollars. That means using the VEETC to keep about two thousand people employed for the next 5 years will cost of about $2.5million per job per year. I’ve written about NRDC’s proposal for a Greener Biofuels Tax Credit and obviously believe that would create more jobs, more security and more environmental benefits, but the reality is just about anything would be more cost effective than simply extending the VEETC in its current form.

So now to some of the wonky numbers behind points 2 and 3 above. The analysis in RFA’s study starts with the claim that if the VEETC and tariff expire, the price of ethanol will drop by the full $0.45 per gallon value of the VEETC. The premise here is that industry has fully internalized this incentive and so their marginal costs fully reflect it. For this to be true we have to accept the notion that corn ethanol is wildly uneconomic and needs this $0.45 simply to survive—meaning that neither the industry nor the oil companies are profiting at all at the taxpayers’ expense. While big ethanol likes to claim that its margins are razor thin, this implies that we’ll have to subsidize them forever. A more realistic assumption is that the oil companies are pocketing most if not all of the VEETC value. After all, the demand and supply have been a bit above the RFS mandated levels every year, which means the oil companies are setting the demand level and thus the price levels. Big oil gets to keep big ethanol’s prices low and keep the VEETC as profit.

This is a key assumption because the initial price hit of removing the VEETC triggers shifts in demand, which trigger further shifts in price and thus supply based on elasticities of supply and demand. The net result is a smaller change in the price and supply of ethanol.

[Since I had to remind myself, here’s a quick refresher on elasticity of demand and supply: the former refers to how demand in the market for a good changes in response to changes in price, whereas the latter refers to changes in the supply of the good as a result of price changes. When demand is perfectly inelastic, even large changes in price will not cause a decrease in demand. Perfectly inelastic supply—i.e. supply that is fixed no matter what the price—means that regardless how high a price people are willing to pay, no more supply of a specific good will be produced].

RFA notes that the elasticity of demand for ethanol, as with gasoline, is relatively inelastic, with fairly consistent published estimates (between -0.37 and -0.43, meaning a 10% decline in the price of ethanol would result in a 3.7 to 4.3% increase in demand). In the case of the elasticity of supply, however, the range of published estimates is much wider: from 0.37 on the low end to 4.0 on the high end. This large a discrepancy in estimates should prompt further discussion or perhaps the use of ranges and/or scenarios in an analysis such as RFA’s. Instead, RFA chooses the dubious route of simply averaging available supply elasticities to arrive at a magic estimate of 1.375 (meaning that a 10% decline in ethanol prices would result in a much higher 13.8% decline in production).

The results of their full calculation can be seen in this table from RFA’s study: