Biden needs to start going after large corporations if he wants to win again
As America slouches toward the midterm elections, you need an economic message that celebrates your accomplishments to date – job creation and higher wages – yet also takes aim at the major abuses of economic power that remain in the system, fueling inflation and widening inequality.
You should put these 10 indisputable facts center stage:
1. Corporate profits are at a 70-year high. Yet corporations are raising their prices.
2. They are not raising prices because of the increasing costs of supplies and components and of labor – which are real but expected when an economy goes suddenly from a pandemically induced deep freeze due to meeting the soaring demands of consumers who are emerging from the pandemic. Corporations enjoying record profits in a healthy competitive economy would absorb these costs.
3. Instead, they’re passing these costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices. In many cases they’re raising prices higher than those cost increases, using the cover of inflation to increase their profit margins even more.
4. They’re doing so because they face little or no competition. If markets were competitive, companies would keep their prices down to prevent competitors from grabbing away customers. As the White House National Economic Council put it in a December report: “Businesses that face meaningful competition can’t [maintain high profit margins and pass on higher costs to consumers], because they would lose business to a competitor that did not hike its margins.”
5. Since the 1980s, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated. This concentration gives corporations the power to raise prices because it makes it easy for them to informally coordinate price increases with the handful of other
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