Study of Economics: Public Policy

By Hugo Passemard

Every housewife in this country that is America pays four to five times the world price for a pound of sugar. If she were able to buy that sugar on the world market, it would cost a fifth of what it now costs. Why can't she? Well, there are a few hundred thousand farmers who grow sugar beets, some who grow cane for the sugar; between them they have been able to persuade the congress to put a quota on the imports of sugar from abroad. Now those sugar quotas do the consumers a great deal of harm. They help the one hundred, two hundred thousand maybe, I don't know what the exact number is, maybe it's more, maybe it's less, but a very small number who bring great pressure to bear on the congress to keep the quotas. Once those quotas are in effect, once sugar has become expensive, it turns out that there are more special pleaders because then it turns out with sugar that expensive, natural sugar, various kinds of artificial sugar like sucrose made from corn can be produced more cheaply than the artificial price of the sugar, though more expensively than the world price. The result of that is that the producers of that kind of sucrose join the lobbyists who are lobbying for an import quota. And the end result is that the consumers are quiet, the producers and those who are affected are loud and it gets passed. Now what's congress going to do about it? It doesn't like the deficit, but in fact, the easiest way to get out of that deficit is to raise taxes rather than to lower spending. But that doesn't do any good from the point of view of the consumer. You pay for it one way or another. The real question is: how much are you required to spend one way or another, directly or indirectly by taxes, by lending, by inflation? What fraction of your income are you required to devote to having other people spend it, supposedly, on your behalf?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1715358880
• ISBN13: 9781715358884
• Release Date: October 2020
• Publisher: Blurb
• Length: 170 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"