“[T]he first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries."This isn't a good idea on its own merits. It is an especially bad idea when opponents are trying to make her out to be a socialist.
Unemployment insurance offered during Covid created the equivalent of a labor strike. People with low paying jobs in agriculture, or jobs in close physical contact with customers, for example people who cut hair, stayed home. Employers needed them. The workers acquired pricing power. 
I see signs all around my city today by employers seeking workers. School bus drivers. Grocery clerks. Laborers. Food service workers. McDonald's has signs saying employees start at $15/hour and more. At the height of the Covid shutdown, a Medford, Oregon, McDonalds made national news advertising that they would hire 14-and-15-year-olds to fill shifts. They weren't paying enough to attract 16-year-olds.
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Walmart drew national attention in pre-Covid years for advocating food banks so their employees could acquire food they couldn't afford to buy at their own store. Full-time workers at America's largest private employer were paid so little that they were eligible for public assistance. People saw that as a problem, but nothing changed until Covid and the "strike."
Things are different now. I am paying $30/hour to people who work alongside me in the vineyard. There is work to be done. I need people who show up.
Three years ago it was difficult to get a haircut. Shops had closed. The ones that were open had short hours because they couldn't find workers. Yesterday I got a haircut at a franchise place. Appointments were readily available. There is inflation. Prices have increased from $15 to $23 (but only $20 for me, with a senior citizen rate.) When the stylist flipped the I-pad around for me to approve my credit card purchase, it had three big boxes for me to punch for a tip for each haircut, one for myself and one for my nephew who is down from Portland to help me put up trellis wire: $5. $7. $10. There was probably a place for a custom tip or no tip, but it wasn't prominent and I didn't see it immediately. I pressed a $5 tip -- 25% -- and felt a bit cheap about pressing on the lowest one. If stylists do three haircuts an hour at $15/hour, plus three $5 tips, they are making $30/hour, the same as my farm workers. Okay.
We shouldn't fool ourselves about the actual price of cheap food. I was paying for the food three times. I paid once at the cashier. I paid a second time in taxes for public benefits (food, health care, and housing) for the working poor. I paid a third time to deal with the social problems that arise within an underclass that even when working cannot escape poverty.
We learned that we need "essential workers." Now we are learning that we need to pay them.
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22 comments:
No, it's not socialism. It's cynical, pandering pop-socialism from the new Left leadership in an election season. President Biden has long railed against "price-gouging" and corporate "greed"; here, Harris against "unfair" exploitation of consumers (as opposed to fair, acceptable exploitation?).
One wonders why, if indeed centralized government has the power or authority to set food prices, and gas, etc., the noble Biden-Harris administration didn't take direct action say three years ago. If it garners low-information votes and boosts an entitlement mentality, so be it, it seems.
Most people are overweight from consuming more calories than they expend, also not physically fit. They end up in the healthcare system.
It's not about the cost of food, it's about quality. These corporations produce processed food that is unhealthy, regardless of price. Healthier food should be subsidized, but that wasn't included in the proposal. It seems like it's nothing more than a response to Republican bleating about inflation and food prices.
Trump's "press conference" was in front of a display of grocery items.
BTW the minimum wage adjusted for inflation should be around $25.
Kamala Harris is a politician. She will say whatever she needs to say to get elected.
In 2024 the voters want cheap food? No problem!
In 2020 the voters wanted no fracking? No problem! Now they want fracking? No problem!
The voters want a vibes election with no specific policy proposals? No problem!
Who needs policies when you can win by projecting a giant 😀 on the sky instead?
Democracy is the attempt to extract high-quality decisions from large numbers of low quality components. The attempt doesn’t always succeed.
If that proposal, even though it might not pass, gets her enough votes to win, then I'm okay with that. In fact, I'm REALLY OKAY with that. Will Trump come out opposed to it? What would that sound like? "Lowering food prices is UnAmerican." Yeah, right. She's going to say anything that helps her beat the bastard. And that's OKAY with me.
Yes Michael, the heading of a newspaper article was “Economically dumb, Politically smart.” I’m okay with being politically smart, a rare democrat move. Policy stuff is the democrat way, but voting doesn’t seem to focus on that very much. So let’s go with being smart.
... says the man firmly in the cult of the flatulant orange felon.
We all need to point out the irony of a man complaining about grocery prices from his private resort (with taxpayer-funded security).
Harris-Biden have been doing a ton to help middle and lower class Americans.
That you don't see it on Fox is your problem.
Cheap food, imho, is inherently unhealthy, loaded with salt and sugar if canned. Frozen vegetables and fruits are a poor substitute for fresh, but better than the really cheap stuff. I agree with Peter that Food producers deserve to be compensated well for their labors. Consumers in this Country have been spoiled for decades by artificially low prices for food and fuel, like cheap Gasoline while the Countries in Europe, even our neighbors to the North were paying 3 or 4 times what we did for gasoline, which is why they've had fuel efficient cars for decades, and when Detroit did try introducing smaller more efficient cars, they flipped in the Marketplace because U.S. citizens thought they were too exceptional to drive small cars.
I can believe that, without a seconds hesitation.
I think MT doesn't believe Kamala Harris, graduate of Howard University, and got her JD at Hastings Law, University of California. She has been a District Attorney, Attorney General of one of the largest States in the Union, twice and a United States Senator, achieving these positions as mixed race woman, which unfortunately, too many people count as flaws in her background.
I don't know about MT, but I'm enjoying watching her and Governor Walz eviscerate Trump and J. Divan Bowman Hamel Vance at every opportunity.
One reason Harris could be running a “basement” media strategy is to navigate policy debates within her own party. Anonymous campaign aides reportedly flipped-flopped on five of her radical-left policies, such as socialized medicine and fracking.
“There’s already uncertainty with just what does she believe, what she would do,” Jeff Nobers, executive director of Pittsburgh Works Together, told the Washington Post about Harris’s promise to ban fracking. “And if she doesn’t support a ban on fracking, what is her energy policy plan?”
I was in high school when Nixon announced a national wage and price freeze. It turned out to be a disaster but he used his executive powers under the guise of interfering with the free market to “save” the free market (or something like that). I wonder how that would work today?
It's pretty bad that both sides can appeal to voter emotions, knowing that those empty promises only matter in trying to "buy" votes.
Too many lack the knowledge to understand the limits of those "promises".
It's too bad we cannot have an educational and reality driven campaign instead of promises that will never be filled.
A great opportunity for the media to explain things to be useful, but I won't get my hopes up.
Thankfully, I can survive and live with whomever wins in November. Just hope I can be far from whatever uprising happens when either side wins.
Republicans are the geniuses who brought us "supply-side economics," also known as the "trickle-down theory," which is why they consider the working class "pee-ons." They believe that by reducing government revenue through tax cuts to the rich, government revenue will be increased. Their magical thinking has worked so well that our offspring now owe over $35 trillion. Between that and climate change, we're leaving quite a legacy.
John C;
About as well as it flopped when Nixon did it.
People in this Country need to get used to being part of the rest of the Planet.
Supply side has worked very well for me. I worked as a laborer at the steel plant as an electrician, as did my dad. I learned a lot from those experiences. My mom cleaned houses, and did laundry/ironed clothes to make ends meet.
I'm the first of my generation to graduate college. I decided early on that I did not want to be a laborer, except to earn money to pay for college. My parents certainly did not have the $$$ to pay for my college expenses.
3 younger brothers. One joined the Marines and learned a trade. Next brother also went to college and became an engineer like me, working for defense contractors.
Youngest brother worked at the steel mill until they closed it down in Lackawanna.
All of us did well, because we did not want to be laborers in the steel mill.
We had the opportunity and desire to do better. Our parents died young, so it was our will to be successful that drive us.
We all made it, and we all got married, and we're successful despite our working class beginnings.
Supply side worked very well for us. And for my brother and me, we had merit scholarships and loans to pay for college. And we paid off those loans.
The opportunities are there for everyone. Unfortunately, not everyone has the ability to make use of the opportunities before them.
Look inward, instead of blaming others for not being able to be successful.
I’m happy for you M2inFLA. Your experience was unique to your place and time. That formula of good old “hard work” is not universal although I can see why you would think it is. Here’s a thought experiment. You have a young inner city minority high school student in an underperforming public school, who lives in a gangland neighborhood with a single mom who works 3 jobs and no benefits. What are the chances that “hard work” will change that kid’s possibilities? If we are honest, all of us who have “done well” should be careful about swallowing the myth of the “self-made person”.
Do all inner City youth get stuck with a future life in poverty? No.
Do all youth who grew up in a great home with supporting parents become successful? No.
I understand the point you are trying to make, and I hope you understand mine
As Darwin and his colleague wrote, evolution is survival of the fittest.
A simple Google search will identify many inner City youth who overcame their challenges, and many others who failed, despite being stuck in an middle/upper/rich environment.
We all need to be cognoscente of those who are successful and why.
The opportunities M2inFLA took advantage of have nothing to do with supply-side economics. They were benefits we inherited from the Greatest Generation. At the time we went to college, we could work our way through because the state covered about 75% of the cost and we paid 25%. Now, the state covers less than 20%. Between that, the national debt and climate change, that's quite a legacy we're leaving.
Sorry, I went to a private school. Yes NY State had a Regents scholarship which I qualified for, but it only paid much less than half of the tuition, and none of the room and board, and none of the costs of books or supplies. My loans and work paid the rest
Yes, college is extremely expensive these days. We can blame many for that cost increase; I look for college administrators who took advantage of that help provided by state and federal leaders. Then there was the additional cost where students took more than 4 years to graduate from college due to not truly being college ready when they graduated from high school. During my career, I met many 5th and 6th year seniors. They took a bit longer to graduate due to grade inflation in high school, or poor career guidance.
In any case, free money without any strings made college expensive.
And the push for everyone going to college was at the expense of fewer opportunities for learning a trade.
A variety of factors resulting in where we are today. We have all our political leaders to blame - R and D. No one party gets the total blame. Failing to work together is the cause.
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