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POPSEPA Rejects Ethanol Waiver For Texas Cattle Ranchers Scott Faber with the Grocery Manufacturers Association says more than a third of the corn crop now goes to fuel and that increases the cost of food. Faber says food prices have already risen around 6 percent and critics say ethanol hasn't lived up to its promise. It was supposed to cut pollution and reduce demand for oil. Frank O'Donnell is with Clean Air Watch. It's not often he agrees with Texas, but he does today. He says the EPA got it wrong. Frank O'Donnell: We are actually seeing more air pollution this summer than last. Now, maybe it's a coincidence, maybe not, but we've got more ethanol and we've got more smog. Groups against today's decision plan to lobby Congress to ease the ethanol mandate.
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POPSInflation Going Up, Up, Up Home foreclosures, income going down in real terms, mounting job losses, a high trade deficit, the greatest national debt in US history, the largest budget deficit in US history, a negative national savings rate, 48 million Americans with no health care coverage and twice that many with inadequate health care coverage, and now rapidly rising inflation. But the top 5% of income earners aren't hurting. They are doing quite well. In fact, some of them have never done better. When do look honestly at the obvious and say precisely what is going on? That the political and economic system is not structured to serve most of us. It's essentially structured to serve an elite few. After saying it, when do we get angry enough to say that this slanted economic system isn't inevitable, that it doesn't have to be this way? When does our saying become loud voices demanding that this stepchild of feudal economics needs to be transformed to serve us?
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POPSHey Pal, Can You Spare $100 Billion? Since then the shelves of many shops and supermarkets have been largely bare, except when owners are prepared to risk being caught charging prices that reflect the cost of importing goods from South Africa. Huge queues form outside any bakery selling bread at a controlled price, and demand far outstrips supply.
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POPSLowering Interest Rates Would Be A BIG Mistake Everyone knows the economy is in trouble right now, but not raising, and even lowering interest rates would be a BIG mistake. Because of inflation, people are spending more and more of their budgets on basic necessities like food, fuel, clothes, etc. While lowering interest rates might keep mortgages more accessible and affordable, if inflation keeps rising, even if mortgages are down to 5% people won't be able to afford them, because all of their money will be going to their basic necessities. We need to curb inflation so that people can still afford to live in general, before we start worrying about keeping big ticket items like houses more affordable. And as far as banks go, isn't a free-market system supposed to allow some institutions that aren't performing or are making bad decisions fail? By continuing to bail some of these banks out that were making horrible decisions, you're just reinforcing bad behavior.
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POPSBuying Power of Food Stamps Declines The declining buying power of food stamps has not gone unrecognized in Washington. In May, Congress passed a farm bill that would raise the minimum amount of food stamps that families receive, starting in October. The bill, which was passed over President Bush’s veto, will also raise for the first time since 1996 the amount of income that families of fewer than four can keep for costs like housing or fuel without having their benefits reduced.
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POPSMcCain Calls For End To Corn Subsidies For Ethanol In comments published by the Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, McCain also said he would support Brazil's addition to the Group of Eight industrialized nations and lauded the nation's drive to find clean energy sources. White House economic advisers say corn-based ethanol is responsible for just 2 to 3 percent of the overall increase in food prices, which are up more than 40 percent this year over 2007.
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POPSStart Hoarding Now? "I think for that reason, probably sometime in the next year or two, you're going to see the government trying to combat this, either through price controls on certain products, or through official government limitations on the number or the quantity of things that people can buy. All of this is coming, because the government is going to be focused on the symptoms and not the disease. They're going to focus on rising prices, whether it's for food or oil or whatever, and try to stop prices from rising, without understanding that they are rising because of all the money that they're creating." It's crazy how the government wants to interfere with prices. They're going to look at oil prices and food prices and say hey these prices are too high; we need to limit them with price ceilings. But now they look at house prices and say, oh no, house prices are not high enough, we need to stop them from falling."
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