On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Chris Jansing Report,” Gene Sperling, senior economic adviser to the Harris-Waltz campaign, was asked how Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris plans to define “price gouging,” saying she was “not trying to get into the nitty gritty.”
“Going back to the topic of price gouging at grocery stores, Vice President Harris, can you tell us how you define price gouging?” host Katy Tur asked.
Sperling responded: “Well, I’m not trying to get into all the details, but I want to point out a few things. The Census and the Council of Economic Advisers showed that margins in February were at their highest in 20 years. The New York Fed showed that retail margins were up 50% even though costs remained pretty stable. She knows the markets. She knows that people use pricing power. She knows that prices go up and down. When she was Attorney General of California, she didn’t try to set prices for people. She went after bad behavior, whether it was for-profit Corinthian Colleges, or pharmaceutical companies, or the big banks that won $20 billion in settlements. So she will go after bad behavior. And we’ve had a pandemic. We’ve seen millions of American frontline workers putting their lives on the line. She doesn’t have a lot of tolerance for people who, as costs and supply chain issues go down, decide to increase their margins instead of passing those savings on to working families.”
Toole said:[A]”From the analyses I’ve read, this isn’t just price gouging; it’s a supply chain issue, it’s a cost issue at the farm level. There are a lot of factors that go into what a bunch of bananas costs at the grocery store. It’s not just a matter of a company saying, ‘I want these bananas to be $1 a pop instead of $0.50 a pop.'”
Sperling said, “Exactly. Katie, that’s why I said margins are the highest they’ve been in 20 years. I understand that if costs are higher because of the supply chain or the war in Ukraine, prices go up. But margins are the highest they’ve ever been, meaning they’re making the decision to keep their prices and margins high, even though there are costs, and they’re not passing it on by lowering prices. I think there are examples in the middleman space of markups and kickbacks. So what I’m saying to you is, she’s not doing this to get the government to make any decisions about pricing power or up or down the market. She wants the federal government to have the power, especially in times of crisis, to let companies know that they’re going to be looking out for illegal behavior, negative and unfair behavior – behavior that’s exploiting a crisis to make profits at the expense of working families who understandably feel they’re still paying too much for basics like meat and eggs.”
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