NYT (“Whose Fault Is Inflation? Liberals Want Biden to Blame Big Business.“):
As high prices at grocery stores, gas pumps and pharmacies have soured many voters on his first term, President Biden has developed a populist riposte: Blame big corporations for inflation, not me.
But despite facing a tough re-election battle where economic issues will be central, Mr. Biden has not leaned into that message as frequently or naturally as some other Democrats, including senators running in competitive seats across the southwest and the industrial Midwest. The Biden campaign has not focused its television or online advertisements on messages berating companies for high prices, unlike Senators Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who have made the issue a centerpiece of their campaigns — and who are outrunning Mr. Biden in polls.
Now, some progressives are urging Mr. Biden to follow those senators’ lead and make “greedflation,” as they call it, a driving theme of his re-election bid. They say that taking the fight to big business could bolster the broader Main Street vs. Wall Street argument he is pursuing against former President Donald J. Trump, particularly with the working-class voters of color Mr. Biden needs to motivate. And they believe polls show voters are primed to hear the president condemn big corporations in more forceful terms.
“It’s a winning message for Democrats,” said April Verrett, the president of the Service Employees International Union, which is knocking on doors in battleground states as part of a $200 million voter-turnout operation. “And clearly Bob Casey, who’s doing better in the polls than the president, is proving that it’s the winning message.”
The popular Senators are out-polling an unpopular President more than a decade older than them is hardly surprising. It’s almost certainly not a function of their attacking corporate greed.
Beyond that, aside from the degree to which “greedflation” is a thing (more on that later), few people blame Congress for the economy. While it may not be logical, it’s always the President who gets credit or blame for the state of the economy. So, Biden deflecting the blame on to corporations just looks like buck-passing.
Inflation soared under Mr. Biden in 2021 and 2022, as the economy emerged from pandemic recession. Its causes were complex, including snarled global supply chains, stimulative policies by the Federal Reserve and, to a degree, federal fiscal policies including Covid relief bills signed by Mr. Trump and the $1.9 trillion emergency spending measure Mr. Biden signed soon after taking office to help people and businesses hurt by the downturn.
What Republicans call “Bidenflation” has become one of the president’s biggest political liabilities in his rematch with Mr. Trump. In response, Mr. Biden has sought to simultaneously cheer progress in stabilizing or bringing down prices — growth has slowed sharply from a year ago — while acknowledging the pain voters still feel in their pocketbooks.
Mr. Biden has also attacked corporations for pricing practices in certain sectors such as meatpacking, snack foods, concert tickets and gasoline. His administration has worked to limit prices for prescription drugs like insulin and inhalers, rein in bank overdraft and credit card fees and make airline travel cheaper and more transparent, achievements that he often discusses on the campaign trail.
“We’re taking on corporate greed to bring down the price of gas, food and rent, eliminating junk fees,” Mr. Biden told a crowd of 1,000 cheering supporters in Philadelphia last week.
While it may not be effective messaging—the electorate is even less movable than usual this cycle, given two extremely-well-known and unpopular candidates—this strikes me as a far more effective strategy. He’s hitting genuinely deceptive business practices and trying to undermine oligopoly pricing. That’s a very different thing from claiming that the overall inflation rate was primarily driven by “greed.”
Biden’s defenders, quite rightly, point to the fact that post-pandemic inflation was a global phenomenon and that the United States has actually fared far better than most. See, for example, a Pew report (“In the U.S. and around the world, inflation is high and getting higher“) from almost exactly two years ago. It contains this graphic:
and this one:
Are we seriously going to argue that a global phenomenon was primarily caused by “greed”? And that the level of greed varied widely from country to country?
And, again, Biden and his supporters rightly point out that we’ve recovered faster than most. See this chart from Visual Capitalist:
It’s a bit hard to argue that corporate greed receded so quickly and diffusely.
And, frankly, Biden isn’t Bernie Sanders or even Elizabeth Warren. He just can’t pull off the faux populist bit with a straight face.
Still, leaning into that combative message is not always a natural fit for Mr. Biden. He proudly calls himself a “capitalist” and has long had a close, if sometimes contentious, relationship with corporate America. Some economists close to his White House disagree that corporations’ raising prices to juice profits is a major driver of inflation.
And while Mr. Biden delights in telling a folksy anecdote about Snickers bars shrinking in size without doing the same in price, other Democrats have sounded far more aggressive on the issue. The push to blame corporations has united many factions of the Democratic Party, including progressives, swing-state populists, union leaders and environmentalists.
Mr. Brown, who represents a state that Mr. Trump won handily in 2020, has released several web ads proclaiming he is “cracking down on the companies that rip off Ohio.” Mr. Casey cut a campaign ad showing corporate executives in suits sneaking into a grocery store under cover of night and switching out cereal boxes for smaller replacements. Senate Democrats in tight races like Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Jacky Rosen of Nevada are making similar pitches.
Product sizes have been shrinking for as long as I can remember. It’s been a long time since I bought Folgers coffee but I remember my mom complaining about the 1-pound and 3-pound cans suddenly becoming a couple ounces smaller way back in the early 1970s. Sometimes it’s a function of “greed” but mostly it’s a matter of operating costs going up and consumers being less sensitive to shrinking packages than rising prices. Indeed, Folgers now comes in so many different sizes—all in bizarre denominations—that it would be next to impossible to notice. But the big can is now down to 40.3 oz, or 2 pounds, 8.3 ounces.
“President Biden has quite a bit of latitude here to put the blame where it belongs and he should not be shy about voicing it,” said Julián Castro, the former Housing and Urban Development secretary who ran against Mr. Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2020. “The alternative is that they’re going to blame you.”
But some of Mr. Biden’s progressive allies say the president has found effective — and popular — ways to talk about corporate pricing practices, including his focus on “junk fees” levied by airlines, concert promoters and more. They also say he must balance the issue with a broad set of campaign messages, including on abortion and democracy.
“You’re going to be more focused on kitchen-table issues in a Senate race,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the progressive Groundwork Collaborative in Washington. Mr. Biden, she added, is “doing the exact right thing. He’s not focusing on the wonky, eggheaded debates on where inflation is coming from, and he’s focusing a lot more on the ways Americans are feeling and experiencing price increases in their daily lives.”
Again, I haven’t the foggiest whether this messaging will be effective. But it’s a more honest way of campaigning and shows voters that he’s actually doing something about the problem rather than just casting blame.
Mr. Biden has carefully targeted his arguments about corporate pricing to evidence provided to him by his economic team, said Bharat Ramamurti, a former deputy director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council.
“Maybe that ends up in something that is slightly more reserved,” Mr. Ramamurti said. But when it comes to price gouging, he said, “I think he’s been pretty full-throated in calling it out when he sees it, and when the economic data supports it.”
Which seems quite reasonable to me.
For now, polling shows Mr. Trump with a clear edge: 58 percent of voters across six of the top battleground states say Mr. Trump would do a better job handling the economy, compared with 36 percent who prefer Mr. Biden, a New York Times/Siena College/Philadelphia Inquirer poll found last month.
But Democratic pollsters have found that many voters agree with the contention that corporations are responsible for inflation. Nearly 6 in 10 voters said corporations’ being “greedy” was a major cause of inflation, including a majority of independent voters, according to a poll by the progressive-leaning group Navigator Research.
The Biden campaign’s internal polling analyses have found similar trends.
But, again, the inflation happened under Biden’s watch and voters who are mad about it want someone else in charge. “It was corporate greed, not me” is essentially saying “I’m powerless to stop it.” His messaging about his actual policies to bring prices down therefore seems obviously more powerful.
