Democratic nominee to draw contrast with Trump on tax and tariffs when she lays out details on Friday, aides say
Kamala Harris will announce plans to tackle high grocery costs by targeting corporations in the food and grocery industry, as she previews her economic agenda ahead of the November election.
She will also tackle prescription drug and housing costs, drawing a contrast with Trump on tariffs and taxes, according to a Harris campaign statement.
Harris is expected to lay out some details of her economic plan in a speech in North Carolina on Friday.
“Same values, different vision,” said one aide, describing how Harris’s economic agenda will compare with that of Joe Biden, who stepped aside as the Democratic presidential candidate last month.
Break up Kroger and Albertsons if you wanna help with grocery prices. They have no competition so they just keep jacking up prices.
Also digital coupons can go fuck themselves.
I don’t know anything about those two chains. Do they have some niche that makes other groceries/super-markets non-competative?
And that’s just the Kroger brands
Alberstons owns another two dozen brands:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertsons#Chains
And has shut down or renamed 4 more.
Kroger and Albertsons own a ton of “other grocery chains.” Classic example of just simply buying up the competition
They are trying to merge, to boot. This FTC has stymied it so far, but you can bet your bottom dollar a Trump admin won’t.
Grocery is a very low margin business, even at the conglomerate stores.
The food producers are the problem. Cargill is one example.
Them too! Break up all this shit.
No competition? Walmart is their competitors. So is Target.
Hey i need those things
So far, I’m pleased with the advice her campaign seems to be taking. Maybe being “just outside the bubble” has helped her.
We live in capitalism. How do you mandate lower grocery prices in that?
(I guess we find out Friday?)
Having a strong and active FTC working to break apart (almost) monopolistic grocery store chains would be a good start.
Even threatening them with that would be a tiny step in the right direction.
I live in a large enough city to have choices and everyone is price gouging.
So, I don’t see how this would really help much tbh.
and having a strong and active FTC working to enforce price gouging laws would really help too.
That’s true. My point wasn’t a strong ftc is bad but that near monopolies aren’t the issue. There’s collusion happening and breaking up monopolies isn’t going to fix that.
A larger number of competitors has a natural tendency to make collusion more difficult. You are correct that the collusion needs to be aggressively addressed too. Ideally, that would just be a matter of strengthening and enforcing laws. But, I think increasing competition also helps create a market where collusion and price gouging are naturally much less likely.
Increasing competition is good but my point is that because this situation is an oligopoly rather than a monopoly, aggressive price/profit regulations for people’s basic needs and enforcement will get us further faster and have more staying power than trying to break up a half dozen mega corporations (especially with how involved they are in politics).
Preventing further market concentration, such as Albertsons/Kroger, is definitely needed. And breaking Amazon and Whole Foods up would be good. But it’s hard to argue that a monopoly is a monopoly when there’s three other oligopoly corporations nearby. Which will make breaking them up difficult.
Subsidizing small grocers and food suppliers while aggressively taxing megacorps would also create market incentives that would move us towards more competition.
Salient points. I’m sold.
You probably don’t remember the big fight over seat belts, but it was a thing. As a virtual hologram of a 1970’s Emergency Room doctor, I can tell you. The government mandating seat belts saved much more than lives. It saved trauma, years lost, careers, money - so much more.
But at the time people were all like, “What are they gonna do - force me to wear a seat belt? In my own car? How is that gonna help?”
It’s like that sometimes.
Same for air bags. They were going to make cars unaffordable. Same for drunk driving, “What? I can’t have a beer or two on the way home?!” (Actually, you can have a beer or two, you can’t be impaired.)
Remember drinking and driving? That was a whole thing too.
Geez so that’s why that cop was such a dick.
I’m for preventing monopolies and breaking them up.
My point wasn’t that that’s a bad thing. But that this is more of an oligopoly situation rather than a monopoly.
My town has Walmart, Kroger, Target, and a Co-OP within five minutes of my house. They’re all gouging prices and have been since the pandemic.
This isn’t a situation where breaking up monopolies is the cure. Though preventing the Kroger/Albertsons merger will certainly keep things from getting worse.
You listed three megacorps and a co-op as your local food suppliers. Those three megacorps set the market prices. If they were broken into the 50 smaller companies that they originally consumed or destroyed over the years, there could be real competition again, driving prices lower. It may be hard to imagine several smaller stores instead of just a few huge ones, but that was how things used to be many years ago. As a kid, I worked at a few of them that are now long extinct, having been consumed or destroyed by the megacorps.
It was a different landscape, where grocery stores aggressively competed on price with weekly and daily specials that were genuinely trying to undercut competitors. It was real. I saw it with my own eyes. Families would drive two blocks further down the street to a competitor because something was a tiny bit cheaper there that week. This sounds bizarre and foreign now because competition does not exist anymore. What exists now are megacorps.
The Kamala campaign is correct. The more that is done to create a competitive landscape, the lower prices will become. Can they really be broken up? Yes. Will they be broken up? I guess that depends on how much lobby money the megacorps are willing to spend.
Yes, but the term is oligopoly. And it requires different tactics than breaking up monopolies because they’re not a monopoly.
I made a longer post explaining here. Sorry if I’m coming off as pedantic but I find the distinction in this instance between oligopoly and monopoly important.
This is excellent. Thank you.
Government can help a lot of the time, was my only aside there. But yes oligopoly busting would also be helpful.
Odd, but I have the opposite experience. Small hick town and I’m loaded with choices, most of which are cheap.
How do you mandate lower grocery prices in that?
You don’t. Price controls don’t work and usually backfire in the long run.
Instead, you modify the incentives which exist around prices via taxation. As a simplified example, if you want to prioritize lower prices on staples such as milk, vegetables or beef, then businesses which can show that their margins on those products are within a defined range pay 1% less on corporate taxes. The numbers and ranges would need to be discovered via both study and experimentation. But, by tying a savings for those business to their behavior, said behavior can be influenced. The prices can then be further manipulated lower in the logistical chain, either by direct subsidy or via similar manipulation of incentives to growers and distributors.We live in capitalism.
Yes, but functional capitalism requires regulation to prevent monopolies, collusion and other activities which distort markets. And there are plenty of areas where capitalism fails and government (read:socialism) needs to step in to provide something which society needs, but for which the incentives do not exist to provide it in an efficient manner. Or for which the efficient providing of that thing creates moral hazards. There is a reason we don’t privatize the military.
You break up monopolies
Doesn’t she currently know people in positions of power, that could get started, like, NOW.
Biden is currently focused on correcting issues with the Supreme Court
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Yeah how could anyone possibly work on multiple tasks at the same time.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/14/kamala-harris-economic-policy-aides
Harris no longer supports measures from her short-lived 2020 presidential bid such as a fracking ban or Medicare for All, advisers told Reuters. Not all of the elements of Harris’ economic agenda will make it to the Friday speech, a draft of which is still in the works. Her campaign said it wanted to avoid dividing voters and attracting attacks from business groups over granular details, and will be “strategically ambiguous” in areas such as energy.
looks like we are just getting another lame duck democrat with a watered-down plan that does nothing in the end for the US people
we still need the minimum wage raised for everybody too but democrats think raising it just for the federal workers somehow translates to all people and we need universal healthcare
another wasted four years we could be fixing shit here we go again
goodbye progress
and no one holds the Democrats liable for doing nothing because it is all the Republicans fault
you can already hear the next repeat election
Jesus Christ bro, all you fucking do is bitch and cry about every little thing a Democrat does but have no reaction when it’s a fucking republican. Just stfu with your apathetic bs
Block him and be done with it.
If everyone reasonable blocks them, nobody is left to downvote and push back and their messaging reaches more susceptible voters.
Zero-blocklist fam rise up
Think of the Day 1 users on here! “Wow Lemmy is cool except for the five wild comments at the bottom of each thread, each with five upvotes* and no pushback” *from each other
Too much fun laughing at him/her
I’m pretty liberal myself, but calm tfd dude. It’s an open platform and in fighting only improves the democrats
Pressuring Democrats to deliver for the working class is a good thing. Organizing around these issues show them that they’re important and not a liability, but an asset. My guess is they’re taking big insurance money and that’s why they aren’t going to deliver on healthcare save for some very minor changes.
Get off the cross, we need the wood
While I do hate the 2 party system, and believe that we ranked choice voting to see any improvements, I will absolutely vote for a lame duck over a wanna be dictator every time.
There is a culture war that needs to be won before a platform can successfully run on all Progressive policies. As it stands now the faintest wiff of socialism causes knee-jerk ‘not mah BBQ!’ reactions and would cause a Conservative run in congress. How’d that look for progress, hmm?
Expecting progress to be instantaneous and comprehensive to your exact particular specifications is
foolishunrealistic and counterproductive to the extent this actually appears to be your intent.my grandfather was that told that same story his whole childhood and he repeated it his son who repeated it to me and am not repeating it to my kids
instantaneous progress does not always happen but in hundred years something should be getting done not reversing
Democrats have averted progress in lieu of not being instantaneous and it is a complete load of horse shit kind of excuse
You can’t actually believe we are worse off now than 100 years ago. Yes, some things are going backwards, like roe due to Republicans. That’s from 1973, so Republicans have brought us back 50 years.
100 years ago we didn’t have minimum wage, child labor laws, or weekends
Women had only just been allowed to vote, and it would be another 40 years until the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.
And none of this is meant to discount the current struggles people are experiencing. The millennia of struggle we’ve sought freedom from hierarchy continues. We deserve to be truly free in the way those labor unions, women, and formerly formally enslaved people demanded over the overseers of our society. I say all this to make it abundantly clear I’m aware of the systemic issues at play this election, and to also make it clear that my endorsement of Kamala Harris is mainly begrudgingly based on that of the candidates she’s the most least worst. We need to keep this energy going in state and local elections. We need to keep this energy going when there isn’t an election at all. We need to realize those labor unions, women, and formally enslaved people fought for those rights with tools of war. They won our weekends and minimum wage and child labor laws with blood. We don’t repay them by saying things used to be better. We repay them by maintaining pressure
How immature and naive.
If that IS true it is only due to your kind of defeatism. You do not benefit your cause at all QQing with no realistic solution, which is why I think your obvious goal is actually a conservative win through voter apathy. Thank goodness it is failing (literally) miserably.
We’ve seen an interesting cycle that was much shorter with corporations announcing* progressive intents, then announcing they’d forget about all that.
* not saying they should be believed, just saying their public-facing stances shifted (within maybe 5 years)
