Marco Rubio is a conservative, and if nominated, he would be the most conservative presidential nominee since 1980, probably. Maybe ever. But he's got his flaws from a free-market perspective. One of his least defensible positions is his support of the federal sugar program.

Ted Cruz's super political action committee, Keep The Promise, is running an ad attacking Rubio for this position, and tying it to the support the sugar industry has given Rubio throughout the years.

I'd note a couple of objections to this ad.

First, the ad suggests the sugar program "takes your tax dollars and pays it to" big sugar. This is only kind of true, and it misstates the main way in which the program subsidizes big sugar and hurts regular Americans. The program does include large loans to sugar processors, but most years they pay them back. Some years, when the price of sugar is low, the processors just surrender their sugar as collateral and walk away with the taxpayer money. This is a subsidy either way.

The main way the subsidy works, however, is by keeping prices high through protectionism. Each country is given a small quota of how much sugar they can sell into the U.S. Suppressing the supply boosts the price of sugar in the U.S. This costs families money at the checkout counter, it drives foodmaking companies and their jobs out of the U.S., and it means we end up with corn syrup in our cola. So the sugar program, more than robbing from taxpayers, is robbing from consumers and the whole U.S. economy.

Second, I obviously disagree with the ad hominem in the ad: "So-called conservative Marco Rubio," the ad says. Rubio has a 93 percent lifetime rating from the Club for Growth, and a 98 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union. Calling him the "King of Corporate Welfare" is ridiculous. Rubio is good on the Export-Import Bank, led the fight against Obamacare's insurer bailout, and is okay (but squishy) on ethanol.

On the donor link, the super PAC is correct. Here's what I wrote in November:



Pepe Fanjul is a Rubio donor, but he is far more than that: he's one of Rubio's earliest backers. Rubio, in his 2010 U.S. Senate race, was barely polling in double digits in March 2009 against a sitting governor. That's when Fanjul and his son Jose gave Rubio the maximum donation.

In June, the Fanjuls co-hosted a fundraiser in Coral Gables for Rubio. It wasn't their last. When nobody believed in Marco Rubio, the Fanjuls did, and that may have made him more amenable to their arguments about sugar policy.

So how does a conservative who generally opposes corporate welfare defend the sugar program?



"I'm ready to get rid of" the sugar program, Rubio said at a Heritage Action summit this year, "as long as Brazil does as well, because they're trying to destroy our agricultural system. They are deliberately undercutting the price ... because if they can wipe out American farmers, they know that land will be developed. Once they've built condos on this land, you can never get it back into agriculture. ... Then they can charge us anything they want."

This is very flawed. I lay out some basic counterarguments here.

Corporate welfare is increasingly becoming an albatross for Republican candidates. Scott Walker's flip-flop on ethanol seemed to hurt him. Meanwhile, there seems to be little cost to conservatives who oppose corporate welfare programs that might be popular in certain early caucus states.

Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.