No Stupid Questions

In an ideal world it looks like monopoly busting but so much of America is only served by Walmart after decades of terrible antitrust that I don't have a clue how we'd make it happen. Price controls are a fucking terrible idea but I haven't heard her talk about it outside extreme medication circumstances so I'm more worried that her plan will be ineffectual rather than openly destructive.

The most valuable bureaucrat in terms of antitrust is currently Lina Khan and Harris has been extremely wishy washy about whether she'll keep her on. By comparison Trump would clearly fire Khan on day one so Harris is still the obvious better choice - but I wish we could get her to commit to keeping Khan.

My cynical view is that this is a campaign promise that even if passed, won't lead to anything of benefit for the average citizen. My solidly blue state has price gouging laws and yet businesses were permitted to price gouge water, charging as much as $60 for a 12 pack of bottles, when we had a toxic algae bloom in our water supply and couldn't drink it a few years ago. Hundreds of complaints were filed and the governor went on the news said they couldn't substantiate any of it, even with photo evidence, and none of the companies were punished or at most were sent a letter to "knock it off" even though residents were still having to pay these insane prices if they weren't able to drive hours away to find normally priced bottled water.

I think if we had an actual left-wing party, I'd have a different view, but instead, we have right-wing and diet-right-wing

As President, she will direct her Administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers. And she will go after bad actors who exploit an emergency to rip off consumers by calling for the first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries, which will build on the anti-price gouging statutes already in place in 37 states.

Based off this I would see a federal law that penalizes corporation for doing this kind of stuff. Whether or not she does and if the punishments would actually deter these corporations is another matter entirely. The other problem is that it always happens after the fact. To give an example, in Canada there was a big scandal where a huge Canadian retailer, Loblaws, was caught in a bread price-fixing scheme with some other food retailers and it's parent company George Weston. After 14 years of reaping the benefits these companies whose revenue streams are in the tens of billions were fined only 500 million. It's more or less a slap on the wrist and just the cost of doing business to these people.

I'd say stuff like stock buybacks and other ways corporations funnel profits away, should be taxed at exorbitant rates. Then start taxing assets like stock portfolios and tax dodging vehicles followed by using assets as collateral as realizing their gains.

I see economists complaining about variations of this policy being bad, e.g. leading to food desserts.

Sounds delicious. Let us eat cake.

Campaign propaganda.

It looks like the opposite of what Kroger has been doing for 4 years

I would think there would need to be some kind of trigger for when retail prices for classes of products "necessary for survival" - think food, clothing, shelter, energy kind of things - increases faster than inflation by some threshold over some period of time. Tripping that flag would result in some kind of more detailed human investigation, because maybe there are extenuating circumstances that would reasonably justify a price increase of that kind. There could also be percentage limits to price increases in certain situations. Different from fixed price controls, which are definitely a bad idea (see: The French Revolution), rather a kind of mandated slowing down of such increases to allow the economy a chance to adjust without having inflation go crazy.

To be clear, I have only just poured this all out of my own head. None of it comes from political or economic sources, and my ideas could very well have unintended consequences, because I am neither a politician nor an economist.

Price cap increases perhaps. No more than 5% increase from the price the product was on January 01 that year.

It'd probably involve a healthy bit of statistical analysis, basically measuring price increases against measured inflation rates and prosecuting anyone statistically outside the standard without a justifying factor like a different formulation for the product or significantly better quality to justify being more expensive.

As for what the punishment would be, I'd say either fining them twice the value of the excess profit, or forcing them to cut prices on all products to twice the margin they went over by until they've lost twice the value they effectively stole.

Wrong community.