With inflation on the rise again, it seems like everyone is looking for someone to blame for higher prices—from grocery stores to the current occupant of the White House.
And while the president doesn't have a big dial on his desk that raises and lowers the price of food or gas, there should be no doubt that government policy has a big influence on where your money goes. Take sugar, for example. Thanks to a series of tariffs and quotas that have been largely unchanged since the 1980s, sugar costs about twice as much in America as it does in most of the rest of the world—and that means anything made with sugar is more expensive as a result. It's a little-known federal policy that costs consumers more than $2.5 billion every year.
