The Center for American Progress, the premier think tank for Democratic ideas, published a paper last week on how to use central planning to make food more affordable. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Grocery prices are still rising, albeit not as rapidly as before. Yet the report’s core argument is that government needs to compensate for past inflation. It says federal officials should make a list of staple food items for grocery stores and food companies to keep at fixed prices for two years. Never mind that the paper itself shows grocery prices only increased by 1 percentage point more than wages from December 2021 to December 2025.
The paper also proposes enforcing price floors for the wages paid to grocery workers and the prices paid to farmers. Charging customers less and paying workers more is a tough order in the tight-margin grocery store business, but firms are supposed to find the money to keep their prices flat for two years from a price cap on credit card swipe fees. (CAP estimates it would only save a family of four $88 in 2027.)
The theory is that if the government reduces swipe fees, which are usually around 2 percent of a transaction’s value, then grocers can use the money they would have paid in fees to freeze prices. This would create compliance headaches for anyone that sells food, from neighborhood bodegas to Safeway, Target and Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, which was founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos.
At the same time government would be controlling all those prices, CAP calls for bringing back enforcement of an outdated law targeting chain stores for keeping prices too low. That statute seeks to protect smaller stores from competition with national chains that can offer lower prices due to their economies of scale. Whatever the merits of that idea, it’s no way to lower prices.
Inadvertently, CAP illustrated one of the reasons price controls are a bad idea. Once they start, they’re hard to stop, even if they’re creating shortages. When the United States experimented with wage and price controls under President Richard M. Nixon, they were also supposed to be a response to a short-term problem. But many stuck around for several years, or up to a decade.
The CAP paper also argues for the wisdom of spending on food stamps and bemoans Republican cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But Democrats were in power in 2021 and 2022, and they increased SNAP spending by far more than food prices rose.
Dollars spent on SNAP tracked closely with the number of participants in the program during the years leading up to 2020. They diverged during the pandemic and have remained far apart since. The average monthly benefit in 2025 was 45 percent higher than it was in 2019. Cutting back on some of that spending after the pandemic crisis ended is a few years overdue.
The CAP paper touts the importance of SNAP by referencing a study that found $1 in spending on families with children returns $62 in economic and health benefits over the course of a child’s lifetime. If that were true, the government shouldn’t merely increase SNAP spending; it should make SNAP mandatory for all families with children.
“When a Republican president directly intervenes in the market to take shares of companies, we believe a Democratic president can and should use the federal government’s powers to drive lower costs for working class Americans,” said CAP CEO Neera Tanden. Rather than competing to out-intervene each other, it would be nice to see at least one of the parties recognize that more government is not the solution to every problem.
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