Economic
freedom is a matter of principle, but it’s also a boon to family budgets.
Just 12
economic policy reforms would save the average household $4,440 a year. Opening
up markets to more competition, treating outsiders and insiders equally, and
squeezing out bureaucratic delays could push prices down enough to give
American families some budgetary breathing room.
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Read the full report: How
Bad Policies Raise the Cost of Living
Nor do
Americans need to wait for Washington: States and municipalities can implement
some of the biggest cost-saving reforms.
Dozens of
studies have looked at specific ways that prices are driven up by policy
mistakes. I collected the evidence on 12 policy mistakes and found that the
combined effect of free-market reforms would be a huge benefit to consumers:
$546 billion a year, more than all the rent paid by Americans in a year. The 12
policy mistakes—and paths to reform—are detailed below……….
Federal reforms
The characteristic vice of the federal government is
cronyism. Lots of well-connected insiders have figured out that if you take a
few dollars from everyone in America, you will be very rich, and
the victims might not notice. Below are just a few of Washington’s
reverse Robin Hood schemes.
Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) standards are the way that Rube Goldberg would have regulated fuel
efficiency. When the Obama administration rewrote the CAFE standards in 2009,
engineers and economists predicted that consumers would lose at least $3,800
per new car. Six years later, the price of cars is $4,500 above its previous
trend. Repealing the CAFE standards would save the average household $448 per
year.
The ethanol mandate requires that refiners use
corn for gasoline. Corn isn’t very good at being gasoline. Just letting corn be
itself would lower the price of gas by 19 cents per gallon and lower food
prices by about one percent, for an annual household savings of $255.
Corporate tax complexity forces corporations large and small to employ armies of
accountants and lawyers just to comply with the tax code (and to seek out its
many loopholes). Commonsense corporate tax reform would lower their costs. Even
if only half the gains were passed on to consumers, the average household could
save $230 per year.
Repealing the crude oil export restriction would
also lower the price of gas by 12 cents per gallon. That’s just a minor side
benefit of repeal, which would also create jobs and increase incomes as well.
But the average household will welcome an extra $227 per year.
The Sugar Program and Federal Milk Marketing
Orders transfer money from consumers to wealthy landowners by raising the
prices of staple foods. A gallon of milk would be 49 cents cheaper with a
competitive milk market, and a pound of sugar would be 28 cents cheaper.
Consumers would save 16 cents a pound on butter and four cents on a box of
breakfast cereal. Each reform would save the average household $29 per year.
Cement production regulation is just one example of the many ways that the
Environmental Protection Agency imposes high costs on consumers. Regulation has
made it much more expensive to build a cement factory, allowing the existing
plants to behave like monopolies. They pass on the costs of regulation to
consumers and then some. Going back to the 1990 level of regulation in the
cement industry would save the average household $14 a year. The broader lesson
is that environmental regulations should be subjected to rigorous cost-benefit
analysis.
Conclusion
Twelve
steps toward economic freedom and away from cronyism and overregulation would
save the average American household $4,440. Congress can make a difference, but
so can state capitols and town halls around the country.
There
are benefits to economic freedom that are not discussed in this op-ed: more
jobs, higher wages, and less volatility in the housing market, for instance.
More deeply, economic freedom is a civic virtue in itself—lower prices and
greater prosperity are the fruit of individual liberty, not its justification.
