I saw a thread on Trump’s economic plan, but not on Harris’.
She did recently lay one out. PBS has given a fairly comprehensive review
A lot of this is common sense liberal policy making (I.e. reduce middle class taxes by re-enacting tax credits) or general platitudes toward laudable goals (i.e. “calling for the creation of new homes”).
What I’m most curious about are price controls on food.
While I don’t like how much I spend at the grocery store, I’m a more conservative Democrat, and government imposed price controls strike me as heavy handed.
It’s certainly going to be something that Trump and the Republicans (worst band name ever) will play up until the election.
Other things, even I if think they are good ideas, are going to be ridiculed as giveaways, like canceling debt. Then again, that’s what big tax cuts to rich people are, so I don’t see why this is really different. Maybe it sells well to the average voter.
What are your thoughts? Are these sensible economic policies? And how will they play in the lead up to the election?
In general, the measures mostly sound like something an AG would do, not an economist. As such, when it comes to reducing grocery prices, my expectation would be that she investigates whether there’s any collusion, market manipulation, fraud, monopolism, etc. going on and prosecuting it. My sense was not that she was thinking of price controls.
This isn’t to say that, once in power, her lead economist won’t give her some proposals for her platform. But, at the moment, I’d expect her to lean on the AG for price reductions.
With respect to groceries people spend a smaller percent of their income on groceries in the U.S. than in Europe.
Economically price controls are a poor idea.
And note there are very few people who are frugal concerning food: if they were they would eliminate eating out except for special occasions, most junk food (why drink soda pop instead of water?), prepare food themselves rather buying already prepared food at grocery stores… And finally people throw a lot of food into the garbage.
Reading the Atlantic headline,I agree that it’s politically a smart message (the price controls on groceries anyway). Not being an economist,I have no idea of the feasibility, advisability or wisdom behind such an action. But it’ll sell well with suburban women trying to afford groceries every month.
I agree with this strongly. Going after “price gouging” is typically a politician’s gimmick when they don’t actually have effective tools to fight inflation or they don’t want suffer the political costs that implementing anti-inflationary measures would create.
Yup. I’m not going to pick at it too hard. The message is not the details of the policy but in telling people who are fixated on the price of eggs, and all those props Trump had on the table that he never got around to, that she is on it.
I’m not really caring about how effective these plans would be at controlling grocery prices. An actual plan will be modified by the time it crosses any legislative finish line. May likely will look quite different. I am caring about whether or not this helps the less engaged voters upset at grocery prices still and blaming Biden for it that she is going to address it better than Trump will.
I don’t mind if she panders right now. I just want her to pander effectively.
On the one hand, yes, such processes should be of reasonable length, and not strung out in an attempt to prevent building where things ought to be built. On the other: aren’t most of those processes on the municpal or at most state level? How much can Harris do about it? Is she proposing federal legislation to have such decisions made on the federal level?
(To be clear, I’d vote for her even if she does want every housing development approval to be made at the federal level – for one, I doubt she could pull that off; and for two, even if she did, while I’d think it a very bad decision I still wouldn’t think it anywhere near as bad as some of what her opponents are proposing.)
There is a good deal of monopolism or close to it (small numbers of very big companies controlling the market) going on in the agriculture “industry”. This is IMO (and in the opinion of a lot of others) quite bad for most individual farmers, and if it’s carefully phrased and, even more importantly, carefully done, discouraging it should get quite a lot of backing. I doubt it’s going to lower food prices, though; such companies often do get prices down, in large part by treating livestock, land, and farmers/farmworkers terribly.
By the time you get down to the farm end, quite a lot of farmers aren’t getting anything like what their production is worth. The high price in the grocery reflects a whole lot of middlemen and processors. In many cases (not all) the individual middlemen and processors are doing something that actually should be done and that deserves to be paid for, of course; making it a touchy subject. I’m more in favor of increasing aid to those having trouble buying food than of decreasing prices.
However, the same principle applies as above: I’d vote for her even if she does want to try to institute actual price controls on groceries – for one, I doubt she could pull that off; and for two, even if she did, while I’d think it a very bad decision I still wouldn’t think it anywhere near as bad as some of what her opponents are proposing.
While this is true of some of the people who complain about food prices, it certainly isn’t true of everybody. I for one can personally attest that it’s currently difficult to buy food if you’re broke even if you almost never eat out, drink a lot of water and no soda, and do almost all your own cooking. And I have a kitchen and storage space and freezers and lots of cooking equipment, and grow some of my own food. A lot of poor people aren’t in a position to do any of that. And some of them will have to buy water if they don’t buy soda; or else drink lead or other contaminants.
One thing that I noted when I started running numbers on living costs and wages is that, if people were thinking of retirement, emergency planning, etc. they’d never dream of taking a wage like what they generally do. Whereas, if you calculate how much they need to survive from day to day, without any thought for the future, that’s pretty well where a lot of people top out.
Given the prevalence of small farmers, I can easily imagine the same dynamic. They’re selling for pennies because that’s all they need to make to survive until the next harvest (and they’re already largely self-sufficient, once you ignore retirement). And you only need a few to do it before the rest follow, to keep in demand.
As you say, solving that would likely raise prices. So while breaking up a monopoly might help price gouging in the store, it might also raise the bargaining power of farmers and raise prices to balance.
Probably the better answer would be to follow monopoly busting by encouraging businesses to join together vertically rather than horizontally. Try to get farms, packagers, and meal prep companies to merge, to remove profit motive between the farm and the store.
That’s already happening, in at least one segment of agriculture. The largest pork producers in the country (Smithfield, Tyson, Seaboard, and others) are also the largest pork processors in the country. It’s very monopoly-like, if it isn’t already there.
I don’t know of the specifics of her proposal, but there is a White House Fact Sheet about some specific ways that the administration is working now to incentivize increased housing supply. One of the ways (via another fact sheet linked from that page) included putting more money to communities that make certain reforms to their process to ease development, (The actual mechanism is by scoring the grant applications from those jurisdictions higher.) None of this is going to work quickly, but a Harris win this fall would mean some increase in the housing supply due to these kinds of reforms will take effect before 2028 or so.
McDonald’s is famous for vertical integration. They own farms, processing plants, warehouses, distributors, and of course the retail restaurants, plus the trucks in between all of those steps.
Well, yeah, it’s difficult to buy anything if you’re broke. That’s what “broke” means. But it’s still a lot easier without the luxuries than with them, and yet, very few Americans choose to forego the luxuries.
Sure, but you need to figure out some cooperative legal structure, so that individual farmers can be “owned” by Amy’s, evol, Stouffer’s, etc. without becoming tenant farmers.
And if you are trying to survive from day to day – it’s not that you take no thought for the future. It’s that, if you can’t make it through this week or this month, it wouldn’t help to theoretically be better off in the future; you’re screwed right now.
Many people aren’t looking at ‘Tomorrow morning, I could take this job which pays X times 2 what I’m currently getting’ – because they’re not in any position to do that. They might be looking at, ‘If I did things differently for the next three years, I might be in a position to get that job – but I would have no way to get through the next three years’ {or maybe the next three weeks), so I can’t do that. If I stick with what I’m doing now, I may be screwed in thirty years, but I (and the kids if any) will eat this month.’
The companies doing that now have a very great tendency to screw the people at the bottom. Farmers who take contracts, for instance, to grow livestock animals for such a company (such as the ones @Railer13 mentioned) often lose all their ability to make choices about their operation (that independence being a large part of why many small farmers keep at it), and then wind up getting screwed on the money also by details hidden in the small print and/or by contracts that look great if everything goes well but dump all the costs on the farmers if they don’t (and there are a shitload of things that can go badly in farming that are not under the control of the farmer.)
What’s needed to fix that is either the opposite of vertical integration, in that the farmer needs to have a number of processors to choose from; or the very small-scale version of it known as value-added, in which the farm itself does any processing needed and, at least sometimes, sells the product retail. However the expense of setting up legal processing operations, especially for any products involving animal products, is very large; some of it for good reason (much of food processing does need some oversight, and facilities which are genuinely cleanable and actually cleaned, and control of processing times etc. to make the food safe) and some of it for very bad reason (those few large companies are quite happy with regulations that are written with no attention to scale, so that only large companies can afford to fulfill them.)
Ah. Some of that is already happening, though I think some of what I’ve been seeing is also on the state level; and some grants are only available to communities that are making such changes.
I’ve got no problem at all with that as long as the required changes are sensibly written; which I have the impression that they are, though I haven’t studied up on this in detail – I’m on a planning board, but it’s the Town Board not the Planning Board which would deal with grant requirements; probably passing suggested changes on to the Planning Board for us to work out suggested language and pass it back to them. We did recently, on our initiative, get the Town Board to authorize us to approve cluster developments, though I don’t believe any specific grant was involved. (Cluster developments allow for putting houses on smaller lots clustered together, with a joint septic system if the lots are too small to each sustain their own, and with a conservation easement placed on the rest of the lot they’re being subdivided from. We wanted this to help preserve agricultural land, but also to encourage building cheaper housing.)
I don’t know how many is “very few”. Do you have statistics? Do the statistics allow for the difficulties of people without good kitchens and/or without good tap water and/or who have every adult in the household working long hours? Do they distinguish people who get only an occasional treat from those who are routinely eating most meals out and drinking lots of soda?
That would only work if the farmers owned the cooperative. Sometimes it works if they do; sometimes eventually the cooperative’s board stops cooperating.
Both of these things. How much power do people think the President really has anyway? They can’t just snap their fingers and change the price of eggs.
But if people like her policies-- whatever the heck they turn out to be-- it’s of paramount importance to make sure the Dems control both houses of Congress.
I wrote this up elsewhere. I think the price fixing may not go far, as courts will try to stop any law.
Now we are in a democratic term. Inflation did happen. Big corporations, two or three of whom control any particular product category (phones, diapers, toilet paper, baby food). Would they hesitate to raise prices? No. It will be blamed mostly on the current president. They want the republican elected, so that he can reduce corporatre tax. Once he is elected, will they reduce prices? (After their taxes are cut). No. Corporations never lower prices.
Corporations have paid 20-30% tax in recent times. It is apparently worth the trouble to buy as many senators and presidents as you can for even 5%. And then also have someone like Trump who defund the IRS so they can’t collect tax.
So Trump does seem to be able to funnel money and manipulate people. His understanding of the economy for the rest of us is poor. He does not understand tariffs and balance of trade, for example. And he rarely does anything for you or me. At the end of his term he insisted on signing the covid checks. I don’t think he would approve those again. Corporations were bailed out and will be again.
How does the voter figure out what is going on? They do not. They respond to prices going up, but never follow how much their salary goes up at the same time. Luxury good prices go up almost immediately when inflation starts. Small snacks at the gas station go up more than a bag of flour. Voters note a few things, ones they buy most often. Voters also do not remember very well how they were financially four years ago. It’s just not something that can be measured by the consumer very well. If all the people around are complaining about prices, they conclude they were better off a few years ago.