On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Chris Jansing Reports,” Harris-Walz Campaign Senior Economic Adviser Gene Sperling responded to a question on how 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris plans to define “price gouging” by stating that “we’re not trying to do every detail.”
Host Katy Tur asked, “I want to go back to price gouging at the grocery store. Can you tell me how VP Harris will define price gouging?”
Tur then said, “[A]ccording to the analysis that I’ve read — and I can see you’re much more well-versed on this than I am — it’s not just price gouging, it’s supply chain issues, it’s cost issues at the farm level. There’s all sorts of stuff that goes into how much a bunch of bananas costs at the grocery store. It’s not just a corporation saying, I want these bananas to be $1 each instead of $0.50.”
Sperling responded, “Absolutely, and Katy, that’s why I mentioned profit margins being higher than they’ve been in 20 years. If your costs are high because of supply chains or the war in Ukraine, yes, we understand that will lead prices to be higher. But when your profit margins are higher than historically, that means that, even with your costs, you’re making a decision to keep prices and profit margins high, as opposed to passing those on at lower prices. And we think that there are examples in the middleman area where there are markups, where there are paybacks. So, what I would say to people is she is not doing this to try to, like, have the government, like, in any way make determinations on all pricing power and markets going up and down. She wants the federal government to have the power to signal to companies, particularly when we’re in a time of crisis, that we are going to be looking for illegal behavior, negative, unfair behavior where you’re taking advantage of a crisis to jack up…profits at the expense of working families who still feel, rightly, that they are still paying too much for basic things like meat and eggs.”
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