For decades the federal government has been fixing the price of sugar.
Lawmakers say it saves jobs, but critics say it's not - it's eliminating them.
A San Antonio candy company has seen its business sour as a direct result of the government fixing the price of sugar.
The Judson-Atkinson Candy Company has suspended operations after more than 110 years of making candy.
"It's very frustrating," said Amy Atkinson Voltz. "I know we make a quality candy. We always have. It's what we do."
Atkinson Voltz said her family's candy company has been forced to lay off more than 100 workers. They're now down to 14 in the plant.
"It's been really hard. We had to bring in employees who had worked here 20-plus years and tell them that we were not going to produce candy right now."
But who is producing it? Go to the candy aisle, and you'll find much of the candy is made in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and other foreign countries.
American candy companies, in many cases, can't compete since they have to pay twice as much for the key ingredient - sugar.
Last year, Judson-Atkinson paid nearly $2 million more for sugar -- just by being in the United States.
"It's totally unfair competition," Atkinson said.
For the past 200 years, the federal government has kept sugar prices artificially high as a way to guarantee prices for U.S. farmers.
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, said without this federal sugar program, U.S. sugar farms -- many of which are in Texas -- could not compete with farms in other countries and would go out of business.
"It would put us at a disadvantage, and in order to help balance the jobs that we have here, what we try to do is we try to do what we call an inventory management to make sure that production costs are covered when we have the sales of sugar," Cuellar said.
But some disagree about the wisdom of the longstanding U.S. sugar program.
"Economists have been saying for years that this really doesn't make much sense," said Richard Butler, chair of the economics department at Trinity University.
He says for decades politicians have tried to argue that the sugar program saves jobs, but he says this sweet deal for farmers really never has.
"It's quite clear from the research that we are losing far more jobs from the sugar-using industries than we are saving in the growing industries," Butler said.
During the next several months, Atkinson said she will be working on finding a new recipe to cook up business, but she says it will be tough, especially with a sugar program that she says has gone sour.
