SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
lindsay owens
Amid GOP Freakout, Expert Says Harris Is 'Exactly Right' to Target Price Gouging
"This is a common-sense set of policies," said Lindsay Owens of the Groundwork Collaborative. "We need a new ban at the federal level."
Aug 19, 2024
The executive director of a leading progressive think tank said in an appearance on CNBC Monday that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is "exactly right" to target corporate price gouging as part of her broader economic agenda, countering a flurry of bad-faith attacks on the proposal from economists, pundits, Republican lawmakers, and GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
"This is not price controls," Lindsay Owens of the Groundwork Collaborative said of Harris' proposed crackdown on food and grocery corporations that exploit emergencies such as the coronavirus pandemic to jack up prices.
Owens stressed that some 40 U.S. states—including Republican-dominated Texas—have laws in place to prevent corporate price gouging in times of crisis and pointed out that Trump, who described Harris' plan as "full communist," used the Defense Production Act (DPA) in an effort to prevent the price gouging of medical supplies during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The American Bar Association noted that the Trump administration turned to the DPA "due to the lack of comprehensive federal legislation addressing price gouging."
Owens went on to observe that a federal jury recently found Cal-Maine Foods, Inc. and other major egg suppliers guilty of conspiring to limit egg supply in the U.S. in order to keep prices elevated. Cal-Maine came under fire last year for posting a massive profit surge that the company blamed on disruptions caused by a bird flu outbreak.
"So this is a common-sense set of policies," Owens said of Harris' proposed federal ban on price gouging in the grocery and food sectors. "We need a new ban at the federal level on the books."
Watch:
Wow go listen to @owenslindsay1 explain how prices are actually set on earth to this CNBC host, who naively believes that “supply and demand” exonerates large companies from any culpability in fueling inflation. (I hope the Harris campaign is paying attention to her!) pic.twitter.com/6sDdMhxeei
— Hal Singer (@HalSinger) August 19, 2024
Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, applauded Owens for "citing actual evidence of price gouging by egg producers, including that they were culling their flocks during a shortage to hike prices."
"Imagine that, evidence!" Stoller wrote on social media.
Owens' remarks came after CNBC anchor Joe Kernen and Stephen Moore, an economic adviser to Trump and a senior visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation—the far-right group spearheading Project 2025—spent several minutes attacking Harris' proposed federal price gouging ban as a violation of "Economics 101" and a "real assault on the whole free enterprise system."
Such assessments are characteristic of much of the response Harris' plan has received from talking heads, newspaper columnists and editorial boards, GOP lawmakers, and establishment economists. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), whose home state has an anti-price-gouging law on the books, claimed Harris' plan would result in "bread lines."
And while The Washington Post's editorial board and other critics of Harris' plan simply asserted that "'price gouging' is not causing inflation," recent survey data shows that U.S. voters blame large corporations for "taking advantage of inflation" to drive up prices—a view bolstered by research.
A Groundwork report released earlier this year estimated that corporate profits drove more than half of U.S. inflation between April and September 2023.
On top of proposing the first-ever federal ban on price gouging in the food and grocery sectors, Harris is calling for "clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can't unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive profits on food and groceries" as well as "new authority" for the Federal Trade Commission "and state attorneys general to investigate and impose strict new penalties on companies that break the rules."
"As president, I will go after the bad actors," Harris said during a Friday rally in Raleigh, North Carolina. "My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules, and we will support smaller food businesses that are trying to play by the rules and get ahead."
Keep ReadingShow Less
One Expert's Tax Day Message: Fight Profiteering by Hiking the Corporate Tax Rate
"We can raise the corporate tax rate and disincentivize this corporate profiteering that's costing Americans so much," said Groundwork Collaborative executive director Lindsay Owens.
Apr 15, 2024
The U.S. Congress should hike taxes on corporations that have been jacking up prices across the American economy to pad their bottom lines, one expert said Monday in a video message marking national Tax Day.
"These days most Americans are thinking a lot more about high prices than they are about taxes. But the two things are actually connected," said Groundwork Collaborative executive director Lindsay Owens, pointing to a 2017 law that delivered massive tax breaks to corporations and the rich.
Portions of that measure, which former President Donald Trump signed into law, are set to expire at the end of next year, prompting fresh calls for reforms aimed at reversing its damaging impacts. Billionaires have collectively gotten more than $2 trillion richer since the law's enactment, and corporate tax dodging has become even more prevalent.
Owens noted that in addition to rewarding themselves and their shareholders, corporations that benefited from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) "also raised your prices."
"Why? Because they got to keep more of the winnings," Owens explained. "It was a lot more fun to overcharge you when they didn't have to send as much of it back to the Treasury Department."
When lawmakers revisit the TCJA, Owens said, they should "tackle this corporate greed at the source." A recent Groundwork analysis found that corporate profits drove 53% of inflation in the U.S. between April and September of last year.
"We can raise the corporate tax rate and disincentivize this corporate profiteering that's costing Americans so much," she added.
What do high prices and tax policy have in common? More than you may think.
On Tax Day, our Executive Director @owenslindsay1 explains — WATCH: pic.twitter.com/lYvJtZZG6j
— Groundwork Collaborative (@Groundwork) April 15, 2024
Owens' remarks came days after Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee made clear they intend to pursue more tax cuts for big businesses and the wealthy if they take full control of Congress and the White House next year.
During a recent fundraiser at the home of a billionaire investor, Trump—the GOP's presumptive 2024 presidential nominee—said he would work to extend the expiring TCJA provisions if reelected. Making the law's tax cuts for individuals permanent, as Trump and Republican lawmakers have proposed, would overwhelmingly benefit the rich.
"If Democrats take over both houses of Congress in 2024, and [President Joe] Biden gets a second term, they must reverse the regressive tilt of the Trump tax law—raising more revenue while advancing the interests of low- and moderate-income families across the country rather than those of the wealthy," former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote in a blog post on Monday.
"Tax cuts for people making over $400,000 should end on schedule in 2025," Reich added. "The Trump tax law's provisions primarily benefiting high-income households are costly and do not trickle down."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Fed Warned to Stop 'Needless Rate Hikes' as Inflation Cools for 10th Straight Month
“The verdict is in: we don't have to choose between low prices and low unemployment. We can have both," said one economist.
May 10, 2023
Progressive economists on Wednesday welcomed newly released U.S. inflation data as further evidence that price increases can be brought under control without crushing the labor market and throwing millions out of work.
But they also warned that the still-strong job market could falter, with devastating consequences for workers, if the Federal Reserve keeps raising interest rates in the coming months.
"The verdict is in: We don't have to choose between low prices and low unemployment. We can have both," said the Groundwork Collaborative's Lindsay Owens after the Labor Department released new data showing that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 4.9% in April compared with the previous year—a cooler figure than analysts expected.
"Today's inflation numbers show 10 straight months of falling inflation on the heels of a 53-year record low unemployment rate," Owens said, referring to last week's better-than-anticipated jobs report. "The only thing left to do now is to ensure that [Fed Chair Jerome] Powell doesn't screw it up with needless rate hikes that would accelerate instability in financial markets and jeopardize our strong labor market."
Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, called the new CPI data "good news for working people," noting that "inflation is nearly back to pre-recession rates, while the unemployment rate is at 50-year lows."
\u201cGood news for working people\u2014inflation is nearly back to pre-recession rates, while the unemployment rate is at 50-year lows.\u201d— Heidi Shierholz (@Heidi Shierholz) 1683725861
The new CPI figures came a week after the Federal Reserve imposed its 10th consecutive interest rate increase since March 2022, ignoring repeated warnings from outside experts, lawmakers, and even the Fed's own economists that the aggressive attempt to slow the economy and tamp down inflation risks a disastrous recession and mass job loss.
During a press conference last week, Powell left the door open to a pause of interest rate hikes at the Fed's June meeting but did not make a firm commitment, pledging only to "be driven by incoming data meeting by meeting."
Progressives advocates and experts, including Owens, have consistently argued for more than a year that interest rate increases—which target economic demand by raising borrowing costs—are the wrong response to inflation driven by many factors beyond the Fed's direct control, from pandemic-induced supply chain snags to corporate profiteering.
While prominent pundits have dismissed the notion that corporate profit-seeking during the pandemic helps explain persistently high inflation in the U.S. and across the globe, mainstream publications such as The Wall Street Journal have determined that progressive economists were right to emphasize big business pricing power as a significant culprit.
"There are signs that companies are doing more than covering their costs," the Journalreported last week. "According to economists at the [European Central Bank], businesses have been padding their profits. That, they said, was a bigger factor in fueling inflation during the second half of last year than rising wages were."
Major companies have used the windfalls from their price hikes to reward investors. The watchdog group Accountable.US noted in a report released Wednesday that Mondelez, which owns Belvita and Chips Ahoy!, "saw a shocking 142% increase in quarterly earnings after announcing price hikes, which empowered it to spend $928 million in dividends and stock buybacks for their wealthiest shareholders."
"It shouldn't come as a shock that Chair Powell’s actions have eroded public trust in the central bank."
A Gallup poll released Tuesday showed that just 36% of U.S. adults have either a "great deal" or a "fair amount" of confidence in Powell, a former private equity executive first nominated to the Fed chairmanship by former President Donald Trump.
President Joe Biden renominated Powell to the critical post in late 2021 despite outspoken opposition from some Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
"The 36% rating for Powell is the lowest Gallup has measured for him during his six years as Fed chair. It is also the lowest reading Gallup has had for any prior Fed chair," the polling organization noted in a summary of its findings.
Owens said in response to the survey that "it shouldn't come as a shock that Chair Powell's actions have eroded public trust in the central bank."
"Instead of fighting for a strong labor market and securing our banking system, Chair Powell has enacted 10 consecutive rate hikes and put us at risk of a recession," said Owens. "Americans want a Fed that is on their side, not the side of big banks."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular