I get what you are saying now, thanks for clarifying.tzor wrote:When I use the expression robbing Peter to pay Paul I'm not specifically thinking of class warfare. Peter is the one who doesn't have the tax break, and Paul is the one who has the tax break. Peter and Paul may even be the same person.Count Arioch the 28th wrote:how many people would renewable energy benefit? If I'm robbing Peter to pay 4.6 billion people, Peter is going down with extreme prejudice.tzor wrote: Just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Example: Currently we have big taxbreaks on corn based ethanol (finally Gore admitted this was only done because of politics). These taxbreaks divert a lot of corn into ethanol production. This causes massive increases in the price of non ethanol corn based products like tacos. People who buy tacos are Peter. People who buy ethanol fuel is Paul. On top of it all both Peter and Paul have to pay for this tax break because it occured upwards on the chain; it's a wash for Paul (he should come out ahead but that's not going to happen in the real world), it's a double whammy on Peter.
More importantly if you help A you indirectly hurt B because you aren't helping B. B could be actually better than A but you will never know because everyone is going to do A because of the help A is getting.
And don't get me started on Ethanol, my econ teacher has explained that to me. According to her, it was an attempt to drive corn prices up. However, what happened was a bunch of grain farmers grew corn in their fields (as opposed to soy, wheat, barley, etc), which meant corn was oversupplied. Ironically the farmers who grew wheat, soy, and other grains were the ones who benefited because there was less supply for non-corn grains but roughly equivalent demand.
Ag bill comes up for vote soon. My econ teacher said it would make the health debate look like nothing.