This is Hear Me Out. I'm your host Celeste Headley. If you're an American who eats food,

you probably know it is really, really, really, really, really, really, really hard to avoid

sugar in this country. It is ubiquitous, it's addictive, and for the government, it is

very lucrative. Every few years, the Farm Bill is up for renewal in our legislature.

This is one of those years, and so it's time to talk about sugar. The U.S. has a complicated

system of incentives that all together make American sugar artificially expensive. That

benefits domestic sugar producers, of course, so the question is, do we need to be doing

this? Is it actually better for the average consumer?

There are other countries that actually have no sugar program in place. They don't engage

in these cashianianigans, and their sugar supplies needs to be just fine.

Colin Graybo of the Cato Institute joins us in just a moment. Stay with us.

Welcome back to Hear Me Out. I'm Celeste Headley. So for a short time here, I have another

podcast available to it is a limited series called Big Sugar from I Heart Podcasts and

Imagine Media. It's a deep dive into the secretive multi-billion dollar sugar industry, and

it exposes the exploitation and lies that are inside every sweet spoonful that we add

to our coffee. You can find Big Sugar wherever you listen, and I obviously encourage you

to do that. But we thought this would actually be a good opportunity to introduce you to

an unpopular idea in this country that consuming sugar isn't just bad for your health. It's

also bad for the economy and for our government that in short, sugar is, well, kind of bad. The

American government has subsidized and supported the sugar industry since we became a republic.

But the way we do it now looks to a lot of people like government overreach, and at worst,

some people think it looks a lot like we're propping up a cartel. Colin Graybo is a research fellow

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