Conor here: Many on the left seem eager to believe that Kamala will continue the one bright spot from the Biden administration: violations from the DOJ Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission on things like concentration and price fixing.
However, the Harris campaign has not yet voiced support for Jonathan Kanter (head of the DOJ antitrust) or Lina Khan (head of the FTC). We’re getting a steady feed of stories about Kamala’s catch between billionaire donors and progressives.
The plutocrats want Khan gone, and the Harris campaign declined to comment. Is there anything, anything in Harris’ record that would lead us to believe that he will stand up to billionaires, or does his history suggest the opposite?
While many are taking Harris’s big August economic speech as a reason to celebrate because he talked about the convergence and price adjustment, maybe I’m not too pessimistic, but I think it’s actually cause for more concern. It was reminiscent of Obama who said good things, but we know the whole story. The non-program that emerged from Harris’ speech was proof of this. I wrote the following when Harris unveiled his rate hike “plan”:
So Harris comes up with a non-plan to deal with rising prices. His campaign can’t even explain what would constitute excess profits, how the ban on price cuts would be targeted, or how it would be enforced. Maybe obfuscation is the point.
It’s impossible to know exactly what Harris supports as he watches policy proposals and rarely speaks to the media, but here Matt Bruenig argues that the proposal to raise prices is stupid or tempting and many are willing to buy into it.
Written by Matt Bruenig Originally published on his website.
Ten days ago, Kamala Harris released her Low Cost Agenda (LCA), a five-page list of various policy proposals clearly related to low prices.
The LCA contains the following text about grocery costs:
Reducing Food Costs
Vice President Harris knows that rising food prices remain a major concern for American families. Many major grocery chains have seen production costs drop, kept prices high and seen their highest profits in two decades. While some food companies have passed these warnings, others have not. Price fluctuations are common in free markets, but Vice President Harris recognizes that there is a big difference between a fair price and extreme prices unrelated to the cost of doing business that Americans have seen in the food and grocery industry.
That’s why Vice President Harris and Governor Walz will work to create a plan in their first 100 days to go after bad actors to lower the grocery costs of Americans and curb inflation. They will work with Congress to:
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Promote the organization’s first-ever ban on food and grocery price increases;
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Establish clear rules of the road to ensure that large corporations cannot unfairly exploit consumers to make excessive profits on food and groceries.
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Protect the new authority of the FTC and state attorneys general to investigate and impose tough new penalties on companies that break the rules.
The document does not provide any further explanation as to what exactly is meant by “increase in price.” But given that the introduction to this particular sentence says that grocery prices are inflated by large, overly profitable grocery chains and that the program aims to “reduce grocery costs for the American people,” it would make sense to assume that Harris. proposes some form of legislation that would penalize grocers for setting prices far above their costs.
Establishing clearly some kind of cost and cost law in grocery store prices is controversial and therefore a number of articles have been published either criticizing the idea or reporting on the reactions of various economists and industry spokespersons.
Rather than defend the idea of enforcing some kind of price regulation to lower grocery prices now, various writers have decided to defend the much smaller idea of preventing some price increases after a natural disaster.
For example, in The AtlanticZephyr Teachout defends the Harris program by referring to these very few state laws:
Price gouging in popular opinion has a “know it when you see it” quality, but it’s actually a well-developed rule. A typical price reduction claim has four elements. First, a trigger event, sometimes called an “abnormal market disruption,” such as a natural disaster or power outage, must occur. Second, in most jurisdictions, the claim must affect essential goods and services. (No one cares if you overcharge for Louis Vuitton handbags during a hurricane.) Third, the price increase must be “excessive” or “unconscionable,” which most states define as exceeding a certain percentage, usually 10 to 25 percent. Finally, the higher price must be more than the increased cost of the seller. This is important: Even in times of emergency, sellers are allowed to keep their profit margins. They just can’t increase those margins too much.
In Axios, Emily Peck does the same thing, telling us to “think of the ban on selling $10 bottles of water after the big storm” and explaining that this kind of very small regulation to fight price gouging already exists in 38 countries.
With only one sentence in a five-page tome to go on, it’s pointless to argue about what Harris really meant. Of course, because this section of the campaign document was probably compiled by various people in the OMI-AELP-ILSR-MPU-Prospect policy bloc, it may not have a specific objective that can be really discovered.
But if we interpret the price hikes the way they defend them in the speech, then Harris’ proposal to regulate prices won’t actually lower grocery costs right now. At best, it’s a promise to keep them from waking up too much during future natural disasters, something that’s already illegal in 38 states anyway.
I don’t mean to play dumb here. I understand that election season is a season of great dishonesty and bad faith. Campaigns must balance various conflicting constituencies, participants of various speeches are really bought because they are talked to or they fear a bad election result, so misunderstanding and misunderstanding is a deliberate strategy of persuasion.
In this case, it seems clear that, when he says he’s going to lower grocery prices by fighting deflation, the Harris campaign and those on its side are hoping that ordinary people will like the sound of that because they don’t like the current prices. and thinks that fighting “price cuts” means he’s going to lower them while hoping that the elite rhetoric can be mitigated by insisting that “price cuts” actually refers to a very different policy that will do nothing to lower current grocery store prices.
As long as the circulation does not fall, it is a victory for the messages. But if you’re someone like me who still does something like policy talk despite it at all, the whole thing is a frustrating and depressing spectacle.
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