Group items tagged

The Minister of Education, Mr. David Laws, wants to reduce the national expenditure on school uniform. He believes that the inflated price of school uniform up to 52 million pounds per year is excessive. The schools in the UK have to reduce the opportunity cost of demanding overly priced uniform. This practice must be stopped. In implementing this policy, British families would be able to save 52 million pounds in one year, which is a sizeable proportion of many poor families budgets. In many lower income families in this period of recession, families who are depending on food banks will benefit from this opportunity cost of spending on uniform as they have a scarce budget. This will help them to shift their household expenditures to more essential items such as food. The opportunity cost of them budgeting a significant percentage of their limited income to an inelastic demand for uniforms may create problems of great scarcity to families with many school-going children. The guideline by the minister stated that the uniform must be purchase from the cheaper suppliers, which will reduce the opportunity costs. This will mean savings for the parents. The question is how do these new policies going to be effectively worked out because some rich parents with no scarcity problems will insist or prefer their children to wear higher quality and more expensive uniforms, some even tailoring them.

The UK price floor for tobacco.

The following article talks about Obama's Budget for the US this year. It proposes low-income tax breaks, to further decrease the income inequality in the US and give more benefits to the low income earners in the US.

The following article talks about how Obama is trying to help the poor of the United States by "expanding low income tax breaks" and offering them other benefits as well. This would hopefully not only benefit the poor, but also increase AD in the economy as now more people have more money to spend.

This article talks about a 12.5% excise tax on tobacco in Australia which is supposed to boost the Australian economy and to reduce smoking-cancer.