Sunday 17 May 2020

The tobacco economists network - Part 12 - Overview of Testimony of Robert D. Tollison

Overview of previous posts here

Overview of testimony of Robert Tollison

Many of the network economists appeared during legislative hearings. Here we only consider the testimony in hearings attended by Robert Tollison, the others are listed in the appendix which will be publiced in the last blogpost of the series. Of course Tollison received training and he was given some practice questions



Chronology of hearings

Tollison probably got invited after writing a letter to Senator Stevens. Do notice pretends to write on his own behalf. That is a lie.
The report of the hearing by the TI is quite interesting 

We do not know how much Tollison earned for this hearing, but PR-firm Ogilvy and Mather billed the Tobacco Institute a couple ofthousand dollars for the public relations done for the hearing[9]

Do notice the total lack of honesty :

Robert D. Tollison, J.R. Clark, James M. Savarese


Probably Tollison mentioned in these last three hearings he was asked to testify on behalf of the Tobacco Institute because of the troubles he faced not admitting from the start he was testifying on behalf of the Tobacco Institute during an earlier testimony (see another blogpost). 

Tollison is not just addressing social costs, but spends a great deal denying the health risks of second hand smoking even though his statement was written AFTER the 1993 EPA-report.





The same memo shows Dwight R. Lee appeared during three different hearings that year. I did not find the invoices, but the Tobacco Institute anticipated that he would testify, and the 1994 budget listed



There may have been other times when testimony was offered than those mentioned in the appendix ((not yet published). The industry wrote a yearly overview of activitiesin 1989 and 1990, but overviews for other years could not be located.

No comments:

Post a Comment