As gas prices in the United States continue to soar, policymakers in Washington are eager to point fingers and offer solutions. Most of the ideas are not new, and some are certainly much better than others, but they will inevitably be part of the debate. As legislators turn their attention to gas prices, here’s a straightforward list of what not to do. 1. Don’t increase subsidies for biofuels. The most popular subsidized biofuel, ethanol, produces less energy per unit volume than does gasoline, contributes to food price increases, costs taxpayers …
The Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday that, starting next year, health insurance companies must receive permission from the Obama administration before they can raise rates higher than 10%. As we warned before Obamacare even became law, this is a form of price control, a government intervention that has a long and well established history of failure. Way back in 1993, Heritage Foundation scholar Heritage’s Ed Haislmaier was detailing the shortcomings of price controls in health care: Price controls would not work in health care because they attack …
The Department of Education (DOE) has proposed new rules for accrediting colleges and universities, including expanding the power of states to authorize higher education institutions, definitions of what constitutes a “credit hour,” and de facto price controls through measures to ensure graduates’ “gainful employment.” According to the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, the new rules will mark a substantial shift in the accrediting process: Current regulations do not define or describe the statutory requirement that an institution must be legally authorized in a state. Under the new rules, the institution’s …
In preparation for the Health Care Summit, President Obama unveiled his first official health care proposal. It is intended to reconcile the differences between the highly unpopular House and Senate bills. Curiously, President Obama’s latest iteration of the liberal health policy agenda includes more federal power: the power to control “private” health plan premiums. Price Controls. According to the President’s proposal, a new “Health Insurance Rate Authority” would oversee rate review for private insurers, so that “if a rate increase is unreasonable and unjustified, health insurers must lower premiums, provide …
Bad energy policy usually involves repeating the mistakes made from 1970 to 1980 — windfall profits taxes, federally subsidized alternative energy sources, price controls, and others. All of these old ideas are back in play, even though their track record for worsening rather than solving the nation’s energy problems is there for all to see. But when it comes to the green jobs argument — that new federal energy and environmental requirements will create jobs and spur economic growth — we’re also repeating the blunders of another decade, the 1930s. …
In the 1970s when gas prices were soaring, the federal government implemented price controls to replace expensive gas with scarce gas, causing consumers to wait for hours to fill up their tank. Today, in the Southeast consumers are experiencing $4-a-gallon gasoline and scarcity. Some gas stations in the area have no gas to sell and fights are breaking out among angry consumers at other stations. Waiting lines range from 30 minutes at some stations to two hours at others. Marsha Lewis of Dacula, Ga., remarked, “At first I was a …
In 1979, Robert Schuettinger and Eamonn Butler wrote a book called “Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls,” detailing 4,000 years of disastrous attempts by government to control market prices. Tomorrow, the House Judiciary Committee will vote on adding a 41st century to that litany of failure. The target: credit card “interchange fees.” Interchange fees are the fees paid by one bank to another, and passed on to merchants, as the price for processing a credit card purchase. They are set by credit card associations, such as MasterCard and Visa …
Liberals in Congress continue to blame anybody but themselves for the high price of energy today. Commenting on the passage of s bill directing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to use their “emergency powers” to end “excessive speculation” in oil future’s markets, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “The American people should not be punished at the pump for the actions of oil speculators.” Too bad nobody with an ounce of economic training is buying the liberal scapegoating. Last week liberal columnist Paul Krugman chided those eager to blame speculators for the …
