Kamala to fix food prices. Yay!

[Hammster]

WaPo is even concerned. When they call you a communist…

 

[Tuur]

If that were true....she could break up the meat producers.

Price fixes are dangerous. They don't respond to supply or demand in real time....or at all.

It would cause an effect like how when everyone had to stand in line to buy tp during the pandemic.

Initial low prices will get bought out.

Then there's no meat.

Time to be looking for wild hog signs. Not my first choice, but there's a perpetual open season on them. Haven't fished in a long time, so need to see about that again. Problem is I likely won't be the only local thinking along these lines, so it's not like there's a limitless supply.

 

[Landon Caeli]

Sounds like she wants to tear everything down and "start over from scratch"...

...Only problem is that I don't want to be one of her test dummies when this all fails.

 

[wing2000]

Long before Amazon, there was Sears & Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. Seem to recall that mail order made up a surprising amount of US commerce in the 1960s. Small stores were fading before the Word Wide Web, and apparently found it hard to compete with discount retail and bulk buying.

True, but i submit the portion of retail Sears and Montgomery Ward catalog sales was very small copared to on-line shopping today.

What we got from mail order (before Sears tried to be pretentious) was sometimes cheaper; most of the time what we couldn't find locally. Last week I bought a mundane filter online simply because there are none available locally. I'll have to buy another mundane item online for the same reason. It's exactly what we used to do with mail order.

...except now, there is a lot less available locally.

I buy quite a bit on line...but try to avoid Amazon and support small businesses who have a presence on-line. There are some items, however, where Amazon is the only option.

 

[wing2000]

Price fixing essentials like food doesn't seem to have a good track record.

Harris is not proposing price fixing.

 

[o_mlly]

Examine how price fixing affects the labor market-- raising the minimum wage.

Specifically, the restaurant industry.

Entry level workers lost their jobs on the first rung of the ladder to higher wages.

 

[BCP1928]

Hilarious.

Are the Democrats for free market capitalism? Or socialism?

Democrats want social safety nets. The wiser ones understand that the best social safety net is the opportunity to get a decent job or start a small business.

Lasse faire capitalism would be to stop subsidizing agricultural sectors entirely.

I guess Republicans don't favor lassez fair capitalism, either, at least when it comes to farm subsidies, which they support.

Socialism would be price fixing.

Socialism is government ownership of the means of production, Price fixing is central planning, which is frequently associated with socialism, but not a necessary feature of it.

 

[Laodicean60]

They did indeed. Ukraine was a breadbasket, supplying more than 20% of the world's grain exports. That's why Putin wants it.

Russia is a major supplier of many commodities and sanctions created inflation.

 

[Ana the Ist]

Harris is not proposing price fixing.

No? Did I misread it? What is she proposing?

 

[wing2000]

No? Did I misread it? What is she proposing?

The op is quoting an opinion piece that assumes price fixing.

From today, her campagin indicated she would penalize companies that engaged in price gouging or "excessive" profits:

Harris’s plan will include “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries,” the campaign said in a statement.

The exact details of the campaign’s plan were not immediately clear, but Harris said she would aim to enact the ban within her first 100 days, in part by directing the Federal Trade Commission to impose “harsh penalties” on firms that break new limits on price gouging. The statement did not define price gouging or “excessive” profits.

What that means, exactly, is still TBD. However, she is not proposing fixing the price of milk, for example.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/08/15/kamala-harris-economic-policy-2024/?itid=ap_jeffstein

 

[Hammster]

The op is quoting an opinion piece that assumes price fixing.

From today, her campagin indicated she would penalize companies that engaged in price gouging or "excessive" profits:

Harris’s plan will include “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries,” the campaign said in a statement.

The exact details of the campaign’s plan were not immediately clear, but Harris said she would aim to enact the ban within her first 100 days, in part by directing the Federal Trade Commission to impose “harsh penalties” on firms that break new limits on price gouging. The statement did not define price gouging or “excessive” profits.

What that means, exactly, is still TBD. However, she is not proposing fixing the price of milk, for example.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/08/15/kamala-harris-economic-policy-2024/?itid=ap_jeffstein

And guess who gets to define “unfair”?

 

[Arcangl86]

And guess who gets to define “unfair”?

Ultimatly? The courts.

 

[BCP1928]

And guess who gets to define “unfair”?

My goodness! You certainly don't want conservatives to decide something like that, do you?

 

[Tuur]

True, but i submit the portion of retail Sears and Montgomery Ward catalog sales was very small copared to on-line shopping today.

That was the premise a former boss had me researching. He wanted to present the case that online sales hurt brick and mortar businesses. Best as I recall, ended up looking at PDFs of old US Department of Commerce bulletins/newsletters. When I did the research, the surprising thing was that online sales closely matched mail order sales back in the day. Wasn't expecting that, and he certainly wasn't. Discount stores seem to have had a much bigger impact than mail order.

I'm trying to recall when I did the research. My former boss passed away years ago, and had left the company a few years before that. More than ten but less than twenty. Would be surprised if the ratios had changed much. It likely did during the pandemic, but did it increase or decrease afterward? That I don't know.

 

[Tuur]

...except now, there is a lot less available locally.

As the real estate agent said, "Location, location, location." The country stores I recall are no more, but what shut them down was armed robberies, The Five and Dimes are closed in towns, as well as some small business department stores. Back then, a snack company van would stop out in rural areas and let you buy treats. That went away before I started school.

Ironically, locally, for many things, we have more available. That's due to the "dollar stores" which have popped up in many small towns. One of the things we did every Christmas was to drive about 40 miles / 64 km to a department store that would be no great shakes today, but offered what we couldn't buy locally. That's where we did our Christmas shopping. Today, stores like WalMart and Target offer much more than that store did, but that store offered more than local businesses.

You could order from local business. Still can. Our family has one of those wholesale catalogs from a store. The catalog is close to a century old now, and someone could come in and order things from it. Think of it like those old Sears catalog stores. But if you had to order it from the story, why not buy it directly through the mail, and that's what many did.

Have seen a decline in smallish towns, but what city folk call small towns we called cities. Out in what we called towns that might have a single stop light, we tend to have more variety of merchandise, just it happens to be from a dollar store.

 

[BPPLEE]

View attachment 353300

No, Kamunism

 

[Belk]

No, Kamunism

OK. Afraid I don't know what that means. Do I want to know?

 

[Ana the Ist]

The op is quoting an opinion piece that assumes price fixing.

From today, her campagin indicated she would penalize companies that engaged in price gouging or "excessive" profits:

Harris’s plan will include “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries,” the campaign said in a statement.

The exact details of the campaign’s plan were not immediately clear, but Harris said she would aim to enact the ban within her first 100 days, in part by directing the Federal Trade Commission to impose “harsh penalties” on firms that break new limits on price gouging. The statement did not define price gouging or “excessive” profits.

What that means, exactly, is still TBD. However, she is not proposing fixing the price of milk, for example.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/08/15/kamala-harris-economic-policy-2024/?itid=ap_jeffstein

Ok...

Ty for offering me the information. I agree that penalizing price gouging....while still possibly having unintended consequences....isn't the same as "price fixing" and doesn't carry the same sort of extreme predictable risks.

You offered up evidence I was wrong....didn't rub it in my face...and presented reasonable counter evidence.

I know it's not often you see this from me...thank you for correcting my misunderstanding....sincerely.

 

[Hammster]

Ultimatly? The courts.

How much damage can be done before it gets there?

 

[Hammster]

My goodness! You certainly don't want conservatives to decide something like that, do you?

What?