Posted on 11/11/2009 10:41:46 AM PST by bs9021
Artificially-Sweetened Prices
Sarah Carlsruh, November 11, 2009
Do America’s sugar policies harm consumers?
“America’s highest remaining trade barriers are aimed at products mostly grown and made by poor people abroad and disproportionately consumed by poor people at home,” wrote Daniel Griswold in a September 29th Washington Times article. He then identified numerous government trade policies that adversely affect low-income populations: Chinese tire tariffs increased the price of low-cost tires, cash-for-clunkers increased the price of used vehicles, and the 2008 farm bill imposed tariffs on staples such as “imported sugar, milk and cheese.”
Daniel Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, spoke on “Tricked on our Treats: Time to Rethink the U.S. Sugar Program” at Cato on October 30th. He and William Reinsch, President of the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTA), censured U.S. protectionist policies on sugar, which they both agreed negatively impact American consumers and manufacturers.
On June 19th, 2008, Congress passed the most recent farm bill, the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008. This bill includes many protectionist measures, warned the panelists, with sugar being one of the most cosseted. Sugar accounts for the third most costly U.S. trade barrier, after textiles and dairy, said Reinsch.
It is not the consumer that benefits from the U.S. sugar program; rather, thanks to the efforts of sugar lobbyists such as the American Sugar Alliance, a few thousand sugar producers are enriched, argued Griswold. Also hurt by these protectionist policies are sugar-using industries who have been forced to lay off workers and relocate factories due to costs incurred from superficially high sugar prices, he said....
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
If we ever had a free market, it died out along with the dinosaurs.
Prepare for the nativist hate response. brace yourself. Here come the flames.
Agree
So called conservative politicians are economically brain dead in Washington and have no clue about the consequences of tariffs
read your labels...
A whole lot of candy production has been shifted to Canada over the past few years because they don’t have tariffs and manufacturers can get access to cheap sugar from Cuba, the Caribbean, etc. Then they can re-import the finished product to the US under NAFTA.
The “Saccharin Economy”?
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