Four Myths of Poverty and Unemployment

...All of the above could be accomplished at moderate cost relative to amounts now being spent and without further increases in the public bureaucracy...

...Especially among unattached individuals is poverty to a great extent a problem of old age and/or invalidism...

...5) Reforming the tax system to reduce its burdens on the poor...

...In the face of high petroleum prices, people would turn down their thermostats, drive slower, form car pools, and so on without being told by Washington, D.C...

...by George F. Gilder Quadrangle $7.95 Once the feminists had pictured an illusory opposition, it was a simple matter to reduce all analyses into the unenlightening terms of oppressor and oppressed...

...In other words, economically speaking, the best job for a mother in most instances is caring for her own young children, unless she is one of the small proportion of truly incompetent or abusive parents...

...The fathers of many of these children are engaged in the highly seasonal and fluctuating parts of the economy, where jobs are seldom steady...

...Emperor Richard's "fight" against inflation seems to be along these lines...

...2) Abolishing all public measures, such as minimum wage laws and investment subsidies, which make machinery appear to be cheaper than labor...

...So turn down your thermostat, drive at 55-mph, stop visiting grandma on Sundays, and stop bitching about it...

...For, although unemployment and poverty are economic problems, their persistence is not primarily due to economic causes but is rather the result of certain beliefs which are central to the Amerman economic ideology...

...Single men are 21 times more likely than married ones to be incarcerated in correctional or mental institutions: "Together with the disintegration of the family," these unsocialized males "constitute our leading social prob18 The Alternative April 1974...

...The essence of Gilder's great deductive ability, as with most geniuses of detection, is his singular talent for making the proper connections...

...And if the shortage persists, they still promise that everyone will get his '~air share" by---~reluctantly " of course--imposing gasoline rationing...

...One such study discovered, at the I~rd-onlyknows-what cost, that the poor perceive their major problem to be a lack of money...

...It represents another facet of the work ethic, affirming the right of a worker to receive "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work...

...for the person facing the alternatives of low wages or unemployment, low wages are probably preferable...

...The large number of citizen suits being brought against public projects of various sorts across the country suggest the inability of government planners to please the public as well as do private providers of goods and services...

...At present, the government often spends more in tracking down and punishing fathers for nonsupport than it would cost to maintain the children on welfare (or better yet on a rational income supplement program), especially when the result of the chase is to clap the father in jail, thus saddling the taxpayers with the support of the entire family for long periods of time...

...Provided with little information about job openings and priced out of the market by minimum wage laws, they are condemned for not working by an outraged society...

...It is always the heresies which are almost true which do the greatest damage...

...Public jobs creation is not likely to give sufficient attention to the value of the jobs done...

...You would indeed have to pay more for it: not because the giant oil companies are ripping you off, but because the government is...

...Knowing only the discontent they felt with the female roles, the modern feminists have placed all their hopes for amelioration in an assault on traditional male roles, which they seek to adopt, or, if that is impossible, to destroy...

...All the government has to do is, by using a variety of monetary/fiscal weapons at its disposal, to keep total spending by individuals, private businesses, and government itself high enough to employ everyone who wants to work...

...11.00 I J ~lnle ~ddre~ q "it) ~lalv Zip (iollege ~ear or Univ...

...Absolute poverty is defined as having an income below $3,968 for a nonfarm family of four in 1970 dollars...

...But look what happened to Diocletian's Rome...

...The largest category of welfare recipients, children receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children, are too young to work...

...The ideal ratio of attendants to children in a nursery is about the same as that between mothers and children in not-verylarge families...

...In Sexual Su/c/de George F. Gilder refutes this allegation with a move that must be familiar to any reader of murder stories: he produces the corpse-civilized society, or what is left of it...

...From this set of antagonistic convictions flows the philosophy behind past and present treatment of the poor in America...

...The gap between rich and poor is less wide here than in many, perhaps most, other countries...

...Reduction of property and sales taxes comes first to mind...

...Again in contrast, the recipients of a tax cut would spend their additional income in ways contributing most to Cheir own satisfaction, thus calling forth not wasted effort but maximum efficiency from the economy...

...It is all very well for congressional idealists to proclaim that '~jobs that pay less than two dollars an hour should not exist...

...Since the job pays more than $450,000,000,000 a year (federal, state, and local)--with superb prospects for advancement--few of our miseries are likely to be cured by politicians...

...Mead comments that this lack of enjoyment was "not because public rewards given males are denied to them--influence, power, wealth, are all open to women---but because the sensuous creative significance of the female role of wife and mother is so undervalued...

...Every new dollar the federal government creates is a dollar stolen out of the economy...

...But the root of the problem is not economic but ideological...

...The race has been on ever since King Glogg discovered he could take your money-without the risk of getting clubbed--by calling it taxation...

...Urban renewal has become notorious for providing amenities for the affluent at the expense of the homes and businesses of the poor...

...You and I have to cover these losses by paying higher consumer prices...

...Penalized when they do work by welfare schemes which tax earnings at confiscatory rates and which pay women to get rid of their working husbands, they are threatened with compulsory work registration laws...

...In the first place, the increase in private spending that would result from tax reduction would be more likely to reflect the preferences of consumers than public works projects do...

...Rather than show a fait accompli, Gilder produces the body theoretically, as a prognosis---one which a growing bad odor seems to confirm...

...For most people," Gilder observes, "the one place they are least free, powerful, and individual is at work...

...How does he do it...

...There are four myths which play a n especially prominent role in perpetuating poverty and unemployment in America...

...As the numbers in absolute poverty continue to decrease by the process of creaming off the most able, the proportion among those remaining who are either unable to work at all or able only to work at low-productivity jobs is bound to increase, thus diminishing the viability of the good-job approach for curing poverty...

...Men," Gilder writes, "commit over 90 percent of major crimes of violence, 100 percent of the rapes, 95 percent of the burglaries...

...On the one hand is the belief that many, perhaps most, of the poor are so lazy and shiftless they'd rather starve than work...

...However, this would require higher levels of steady productivity on the part of their fathers than the realities of the American job market give us any reason to expect in the near future...

...Indi~mlt .l 7.101 The Alternative April 1974 17 lists that would tell low-skilled workers where there are job-openings for them--is still agonizingly slow...

...Related variations on the theme of public works are accelerated depreciation allowances to stimulate private investment during recession and public jobs creation...

...everyone is agreed that something drastic must be done about it, although both diagnoses and prescriptions still lack focus...

...How long this will go on, I don't know...

...One-third of the costs of public assistance is absorbed by the bureaucracy...

...His assumption is derived from the women's liberation movement's false system of antitheses, by which Playboy philosophers and right-thinking feminists would be considered diametric opposites...

...There are essentially two reasons why this is a myth and not a fact...

...The vast majority of American workers belong to two-or-morejob families or have no family responsibilities...

...The six percent of the population receiving public assistance constitute about half of those in poverty...

...Also the poverty of many low-income families could be alleviated and other positive good achieved if we could improve our capability for employing teenagers, the mentally retarded, the physically handicapped, and other low-productivity workers...

...Since that sorry day, politicians have invented indirect taxes (taxes hidden in the price of goods), progressive taxes, inflation-counterfeiting (a_ tax on capital), tax withholding (so you won't notice), and other refinements, They have also invented national emergencies, wars, austerity programs, rationing, and such to force you to lower your standard of living to what it should be after they've cleaned you out...

...Sludie~ eml_~ I ! Hox 360 _9 BloominlztotJ...

...In essence, the trick is really quite simple...

...The problem at the root of all this nonsense is a statistical one: when they measure the GNP, economists attach no monetary value to any of the work that women do at home...

...I f the purpose of the public nurseries is not primarily to free mothers for "good jobs" but instead to reach the children at an early age with better raising than their mothers can give them, and one suspects that this is what is really behind a lot of the talk, then that is a horse of another color...

...Ronald Reagan Please enter a n e t subseril)tio n __renewal j Regular Subscribers: Studenl or Faruh~ : I [] I ~r...

...By now probably everyone, even the sternest ascetic among the public budgetbalancers, realizes that great depressions with massive unemployment are unnecessary in the developed, industrial society...

...So would a negative tax supplement to low earning...

...On the other is the suspicion that most recipients of public assistance are clever manipulators who have devised a way of obtaining a comfortable income at the expense of the taxpayers---in a word, that the poor are not only economic men but shrewdly successful maximizers...

...Perhaps not so well known is the fact that this gigantic income is also one of the world's most evenly distributed...

...11.00 [ ] 2 ~ r s . $8.00 [ ] 3 y r s . $15.00 [] 3 yrs...

...Whenever the status quo becomes insufferable the inexorable first impulse of reformers is to further reduce whatever beleaguered traditional institution might be keeping civilization's head above water...

...It is indeed true that if all of the poor could be employed full-time at average American wages, absolute poverty would disappear...

...The feminist's initial error is one common to reform movement...

...Experience with public assistance schemes that tax earnings at 100 percent shows that hardly any welfare recipients insist upon working for nothing...

...their "stand-by" value to the economy should be recognized by a federal income supplement that would augment (and not discourage or destroy, as is now so often the case) their own earnings when necessary...

...If the legal minimum wage is below the market wage, it has no effect...

...They argue that lifting price controls would send gasoline prices out of reach of the poor--and after all, the poor are just as entitled to buy gasoline as the rich...

...Yet, from the other side of the globe in the South Pacific aborigine, he stumbles upon some--shall we say--strikingly similar phenomena...

...So long as inflation and wage-price controls remain the operative federal policy, there will be general shortages, including of course the "energy crisis...

...There is much to indicate, however, that a few hours a week in nursery school, especially i f mother is also involved, is very good for young children, but this would not free mothers to "work...

...Our reverence for work is a primordial remembering of the taming of the continent, with sleeves rolled up and sweat pouring down...

...and, although it is easily within the nation's economic means to eliminate poverty as it is presently defined, indigence and dependency will continue and will probably increase...

...Among these otherwise moderate Republicans he discovers sexual revolutionaries who share the upper class style of thought which curiously pervades the women's movement...

...Elaborately expensive "research" has examined the (presumably unique) economic thinking and motivations of the poor...

...Measured by an absolute standard, the proportion and numbers in poverty have declined dramatically over the decades...

...If, however, it is above the market wage, it is likely to deprive some of the lowest-paid workers of jobs they might otherwise have...

...The value of the dollar has been falling since 1862.1s But lifting wage-price controls would also mean less power and wealth for politicians, and they won't permit it...

...Although the workers' paradise has become reality here, it is by no means certain that nature can endure the strain, even if the economy can...

...Insisting upon "workfare rather than welfare," Congress has refused to adopt a rational income supplement plan but has financed elaborate work registration and training programs, sometimes operated at twice the average cost of Harvard, but with few placements of graduates in jobs...

...6.00 [] 1 yr...

...Indeed, this long-overdue exercise may be one of the most important steps that can be taken to reduce poverty and unemployment...

...Meantime the economy will continue to need the services of a casual labor force...

...If it is high, you have to conserve...

...Therefore, the politicians promise to fight for low prices...

...Sex," his book begins, "is too important a subject to leave to the myopic crowd of happy hookers, Dr...

...Payment of a modest personal exemption to all persons before computation of income-tax liability would be a cheaply administered way of supplementing low incomes without destroying work incentives...

...Dick Cavett finds linking together such various organisms incomprehensible, and he recently went to great lengths on his chatty television show to advise Gilder that the linking of such organisms must discredit Sexual Suicide...

...Nevertheless, despite these achievements, it is not entirely due to the nature of the beast that economic issues have not disappeared from U.S...

...you have nothing to lose...

...Progress toward even the simplest essential--regional job "I enjoy reading The Alternative and think it .fills a real need, parti~'ttlarl~ f o r our young people...

...In addition to overhaul, provisions should be made for short-term flexibility of rates, to stimulate or restrain aggregate demand at appropriate times...

...And the average welfare family in New York or Los Angeles enjoys a level of affluence that is the envy of millions around the world...

...But Cavett's judgement is ridiculous...

...Secondly, private expenditures are likely to create more jobs than would equivalent amounts of public works which tend to be highly capital-intensive and heavily devoted to financing land speculation...

...Finally, a well-designed, broadly based tax reduction would be of greater direct benefit to the poor than most public works projects, which often benefit chiefly the middle and upper classes...

...Minimum wage laws not only increase unemployment but also increase poverty among those families which might otherwise have several sources of low-wage income...

...On the contrary, "most people enjoy their real gratification not in the office or on the assembly line but in the domestic and sexual arenas...

...In contrast, reductions in sales and property taxes, made possible by federal revenuesharing, would confer great benefits on the poor, who pay large proportions of their income in these taxes...

...Tests of income supplement plans that allow families to keep much of their earnings indicate that the poor have the usual American eagerness to improve their economic status, even by working...

...It is a wry paradox that in our own time such unfortunate results could stem from the reverence for so sturdy a virtue...

...The pensioner may just let his lawn go...

...Nevertheless, the political appeal of the legal wage minimum is so strong that it is not only retained but steadily increased...

...Politicians have been playing these games for millennia as we have seen, and they have invented an awful lot of ways to perpetuate and cover up the wholesale larceny that is the standard of excellence in their profession...

...They might indeed be helped by "good jobs" for their fathers...

...The country was indeed built by people uniquely given to hard work...

...Whether the poor are "economic men" is a question on which prevailing opinion is deeply contradictory...

...In her definitive book, Male and Female, Margaret Mead cites the case of a primitive society "where women do not enjoy being women...

...Gov...

...It also deprives society of a variety of useful services that make life more pleasant and attractive...

...the rest of the poor are on their own...

...You would be able to buy "your share"--all you want and can afford...

...In contrast, personal tax reductions increase personal disposable income, 90 percent of which is used for personal consumption...

...political debates...

...Families headed by fully employed, low-wage fathers continue to be ineligible for public aid...

...Gasoline and fuel oil prices affect almost everybody...

...Also, although inflation is a divisive political issue, prices have risen less in the United States than in most other countries in recent decades...

...No sacrifice you can make is too great to keep this noble enterprise afloat...

...But aside from the facts that the researchers needed the money and Congress needed an alibi for stalling on the welfare question, the studies were unnecessary...

...The most difficult aspect of this boundless trust that good jobs must be the answer, if only we can beef up the program somehow, is that it is almost, but not quite, right...

...However, in its efforts to root out masculinity the women's movement has become sadly lost...

...when the whole crowd is fitted with the Marxist trappings of a 'new proletariat': Women, students, children of the world, unite...

...If the problems were merely poverty and unemployment, miraculous relief could be achieved by the application of a few rather simple remedies: 1) Providing through the public employment service complete computerized regional job information, so that anyone looking for a job could see where openings exist for his particular skill or lack of it...

...Yet, rather than being antithetical, these two groups---for whom love is free and ethics situational--are closely allied in the struggle for several crucial objr They are, as the other principals of Gilder's list are also, all agents--or, in the case of the dolphins and white rats, unwitting dupes--of the sexual revolution...

...The past decade, Gilder writes, has been "a period when every group of complainants and protesters, however well situated--from Ivy League students to suburban women-are decked out in the heroic vestments of the civil rights movement: 'the (student) (woman) (junior professor) (professional baseball player) is the nigger of the world...

...This brings us to Myth number two: The minimum wage should be set by law at a level that enables a worker to support his family decently...

...relative poverty, on the other hand, in the sense that somebody must always be at the bottom of the income scale, we will of course always have with us...

...Tax reduction would, therefore, directly and immediately increase demand and create new jobs in the clothing, food-processing, retailing, and personal services sectors, precisely the areas where automation is least important and where new demand creates large numbers of new jobs...

...In 1971 there were two million American families trying to live on less than $3,000 annual money income from all sources, and three-fourths of these were trying to make it on less than $2,000...

...in fact, there is some evidence to suggest the opposite...

...Differing slightly from this reasoned judgement, Gilder sees society's main problem to be precisely those who are most free from that cradle of evil--unsocialized males...

...There is reason to believe that if tax reductions were more often used to stimulate employment instead of placing such enthusiastic reliance on public works, several good effects could be expected...

...But the environmental question is not really an issue...

...Granted that mothers in all income groups do a less-than-perfect job raising their children, there is no proof that better results would be achieved in public nurseries...

...In this connection it should be noted that economists are largely responsible for these recurrent suggestions of "making women productive" by farming out their children somewhere so that they can "work...

...But if she parks her children in an indifferent nursery and goes to work in an office where she spends the entire day on a coffee break, the GNP is increased...

...Feelgoods, Black Panthers, white rats, answer men, evangelical lesbians, sensuous psychiatrists, retired baseball players, pornographers, dolphins, swinging priests, displaced revolutionaries, polymorphous perverts, and Playboy philosophers-all bouncing around on waterbeds and typewriters and television talk .~Jmws, making 'freedom' ring the cash registers of the revolution...

...Environmental questions aside therefore, there are still some real economic issues, some real problems about which opinion is sharply divided...

...Held off the job market to raise wages for the unionized labor force, they are kept in the status of children by an a~T~y of social workers who dole out their money, supervise their personal lives, and endlessly sleuth for cheaters...

...Nor are these problems on the verge of disappearing as the economy continues its climb to new pinnacles of prosperity...

...Here is a sample of the prevailing political rhetoric: (Washington-AP)--- ' ~ p o s - als to lift price controls from natural gas could cost consumers an extra $18 billion annually in increased fuel costs, Representative Les Aspin (D-Wis...

...As much as half of the costs of an urban highway project may go for land acquisition, which of course has no direct employment-creating effects at all...

...He said that natural gas deregulation 'amounts to nothing less than a multibillion-dollar profit grab by giant oil companies . . . . " Representative Aspin is really pitchin' it...

...In Contrast, a general reduction in effective income tax rates would also stimulate aggregate demand but without discriminating against the use of labor in the productive process...

...with median family income at $11,000 most Americans belong to a highly prosperous middle class...

...While the Germans ponder where to get more workers to fill their" job vacancies, we have 10 percent unemployment rates in some of our central cities and a rate of 17 percent among teenagers...

...By lifting controls and letting the dollar sink, the government would automatically promote the conservation of scarce energy...

...The flood of poor immigrants to cities having the most generous welfare systems should have suggested even to the most obtuse that the poor know how to choose more rather than less pretty much like the rest of us...

...Also, after years of highly financed War on Poverty, we still have the poor with us...

...For one thing, although unemployment is only a fraction of what it was in the terrible thirties, it is several times as high as the current levels in Europe and Japan...

...And the next step, gasoline rationing, is much more wasteful...

...it suffers from the defect of encouraging employers in a laborsurplus economy to replace labor with capital equipment...

...The need of the entire U.S...

...The first is in effect a tax reduction restricted to business...

...The multiplier so beloved of public-spending advocates works just as well for tax cuts...

...Unfortunately, the alternative of massive increases in public spending has now come to be regarded in certain quarters as the only remedy for unemployment, when in fact the government has the option of reducing taxes so that people and businesses can increase their spending...

...However, after years of mightily laboring with the poverty and unemployment questions, there is still little sign of any recognition on the part of Congress or the public it represents that the poor may be much like the rest of us...

...If the price is low, you use it freely...

...By retaining controls, the government is actually encouraging fuel wastage...

...Unfortunately, many of these projects chiefly increase the demand for land and for large amounts of heavy equipment operated by-small crews of highly skilled workers, thus leaving acute problems of unemployment substantially unimproved...

...Indeed, politicians welcome and occasionally contrive new miseries for the public, since they can increase their wealth, prestige, and power by promising to "fight" this new evil...

...Thus the first goal of some--and the tendency of a l l - - feminists is to sacrifice without ceremony what the New York Times Book Review has called "the nuclear family, that cradle of evil...

...After all it's been the largest in the world, both on a total and on a per capita basis, ever since the GNP measurement was invented...

...The fact is, he and his colleagues have already grabbed the $18 billion, and a lot more, with inflation...

...In the first place, high proportions of the poor are unable to work because they are too young or too old or are disabled...

...R iew Sexual Suicide PERSONS WHO CONSIDER suicide morally okay frequently contend that it is an act which has a protagonist but no other victim...

...That this meant real deprivation and squalor for these people can be confirmed by any schoolteacher having low income children in her class...

...In my opinion, the government persists in its "energy crisis" policies because it is politically expedient...

...Thus, the elderly pensioner hiring a bey to mow his lawn is embarrassed to pay less than the minimum wage...

...It is because we have been so determined that not a penny of public aid shall be given to anyone that doesn't need it that our poverty programs absorb such huge funds without making much dent in the problem...

...They comprise 94 percent of our drunken drivers, 70 percent of the suicides . . . . More specifically, the chief perpetrators are single men...

...The absolute poverty standard remains the same over time, being corrected each year only for price changes...

...As far as good jobs for the mothers of these children being a solution to poverty, they must be very good jobs indeed to economically justify the hiring of mother substitutes, simply because child care is itself one of the most highly skilled and demanding of all jobs and one which cannot be performed on a mass-production basis...

...Gilder accomplished his primary anthropological research among the Ripon Republicans of eastern Massachusetts...

...It goes without saying that a tax cut which merely increased existing inequities would not serve the purposes here intended...

...4.50 []2~rs...

...Low prices are more popular than high prices...

...Secondly, among many of those who are able to work, the achievement of the productivity requisite for a "good job" is simply not a realistic possibility...

...tax system for overhaul is another whole story...

...The proportion of low-income families headed by a person 65 years of age or over is more than twice the same proportion among median-income families...

...Myth number four is an indirect offshoot of the work ethic: The poor do not respond to economic incentives the way the rest of us do...

...Public works projects displace and often permanently destroy large numbers of jobcreating private businesses, erode local tax rolls, diminish the Viability of local gow ernment, and advance the growth of federal power...

...3) Stimulating the economy, when necessary, by broadly based tax reductions rather than by public works (unless the public works are needed for excellent reasons apart from their contracyclical effects...

...17 Deregulating, freeing the market from the politicians' stranglehold, would make gasoline, fuel oil, and natural gas available again in plentiful supply...

...The price of a commodity, not bureaucrats, should tell you how to use it...

...Jacqueline Kasun Four Myths of Poverty and Unemployment THERE WABN~T MUCH fanfare when the United States' gross output passed the one trillion dollar mark...

...In the United States, hikes in minimum wages are quickly followed by increases in unemployment among teenagers, the group for whom unemployment rates are highest...

...Such laws affect not only the occupations to which they legally apply but, by force of example, many others as well...

...Every one of the promises will be fulfilled with your money, and they will all help keep the energy crisis going and politicians employed...

...said yesterday...

...This brings us to Myth number three: The best remedy for unemployment is a big public works program that provides good jobs in areas of high joblessness...

...Single men comprise between 80 and 90 percent of most of the categories of social pathology, and on the average they make less money than any other group in society--yes less than single women or married women...

...4) Extending complete health insurance to the entire population, because poverty and unemployment are closely associated with illness and disability...

...Presuming that womanhood has no intrinsic worth and judging the career world from their own exalted social position, these feminists have joined the crusade to move American women out of the home and into the market place apparently to find creativity and self-expression behind a sewing machine...

...Similarly, the defense for today's assorted sexual liberation movements has been the highly publicized claim that their crimes are "victimless...

...You may as well get used to it all...

...Although there is plenty of work for everyone to do, unemployment will persist...

...Even the environmental concerns which are currently, and probably belatedly, so intense are success problems primarily, being the result of the incredibly high and widely diffused levels of consnmption provided for the mass of the people...

...This position of world leadership in productivity and affluence is taken for granted by Americans as well as by the rest of the world...

...It has become routine in recent years for cities, trying to cope with a flood of jobseekers and welfare applicants arriving from rural areas, to apply for federal funds 16 The Alternative April 1974 for highways, urban "renewal," and other public projects...

...It is a curious fact that this belief, with its implicit distrust of the market, is more firmly entrenched in "free enterprise" America than in the more "socialistic" economies of Europe, most of which have no minimum wage laws...

...But, in truth, women have everything to lose, and the women's liberation movement, it seems, is dedicated to losing it...

...It is ironic that this is done ostensibly in the interests of enabling men to support their families, for in fact less than a third of American workers are solely responsible for family support...

...If private spending fails for some reason, as it did in the early 1930s, the government can make up for this deficiency by adjustments in its own spending and taxing...

...The first is that: Good jobs are the answer to poverty...

...Paradoxes and inequities characterize the welfare picture, where a huge public bureaucracy presides over a system which penalizes people for working, pays women to get rid of their husbands, invites cheating, and denies help to many in the greatest need...

...So, statistically speaking, a truly gifted and hard-working mother makes no contribution to the GNP...

...It is precisely because we have tried so hard to enforce our work ethic that we have managed to eliminate all opportunity and incentive for many people...

...This strongly held belief, inhering in the American work ethic, is paradoxically The Alternative April 1974 15 responsible for some of our greatest difficulties in coming to grips with both poverty and unemployment...

...Economically, the minimum wage acts like any other support price in that, if it has any effect at all, it tends to limit demand...

...is They promise to develop new sources of oil...