Greg Ip
speaker
528 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2018
last heard Sep 2024
Greg Ip’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
People are interested in buying a house.
They would get a home buyer's credit.
Now, that tends to contribute to demand.
It doesn't contribute to supply.
So it doesn't really solve the fundamental inflation problem.
She has, however, offered subsidies to people to build affordable homes.
Maybe that, with time, would help the housing situation.
And then, more vaguely, she's talked about a crackdown on price gouging.
And unfortunately, it's very hard to determine exactly what effect this would be because she hasn't defined price gouging and she hasn't defined what exactly new powers she's talking about.
Her campaign has noted that some states have laws against raising prices a certain amount when there's been a natural disaster like a hurricane.
Maybe Harris is simply talking about some federal equivalent to that.
But if so, then it would probably only take effect in extremely narrow circumstances and really wouldn't have a noticeable impact on the overall inflation rate.
If you listen to Trump at least, his is a more hands-off approach where he talks about deregulation and increasing the supply of oil and gas.
If you listen to Kamala Harris, it's more of a hands-on approach, basically subsidizing important purchases and income for low- and middle-class families.
Most independent studies have concluded that the reason food prices have gone up a lot, and they've gone up around the same rate as overall inflation, is because the raw materials for food like meat, fruit, vegetables, processing, the labor that goes into the factories that make the food, the labor in the stores that sell the food, all those things have gone up.
So to a great extent, the rise in the price of food reflects the rise in the cost of producing and distributing food.
Now, on top of that, it is also the case that grocery chain profit margins have expanded a bit.
So it's not crazy to say that one reason prices are higher is that profits are higher.
Now, is there something that the government could do about that to reduce those profit margins and help consumers?
That's much harder to determine.
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