amount to $1.05 to $1.38 per gallon, or 42 to 55 percent of ethanol's wholesale market price.

Ethanol does not reduce gasoline prices. If you lived in urban areas that used reformulated gasoline last summer -- that's the environmentally "clean" gasoline required for areas with air pollution problems -- you might have paid up to 60 cents a gallon more for gasoline.

That's because the federal government required oil refineries to use 4 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, regardless of price, and gas pump prices last summer reflected the fact that ethanol was twice as expensive as conventional gas in wholesale markets, and far more costly to deliver.

The truth is that if ethanol has commercial merit, it doesn't need the subsidy. And if it doesn't, no amount of subsidy will bestow it.