Man, CNBC’s Joe Kernen destroyed Elizabeth Warren over price gouging.
It was glorious. I hate it when people make economics difficult. It boils down to supply and demand. I love how Mediaite tried to paint Kernan as the bad guy.
CRYING.
Supply and demand because duh:
“If beef is too high, people don’t move to chicken because competitors don’t come in to undercut where the beef prices are. Nothing works when you try to artificially try to control prices. It’s just a supply and demand issue. It’s a flawed idea,” he said.“So did you have a question here?” Warren asked.“Yes, why would you propose a flawed idea when the real problem — if you really want to help the middle class, if you really, sincerely want to help people having trouble at the grocery store, it’s not price gouging that’s the issue, and if you look at it seriously and you really want to help him, let’s do something about it together, fine,” Kernen shot back.“I understand if you want to do a lecture about this, but let’s just start with where have you been for the last 30 years as three dozen states have price gouging laws and they have used them effectively?” Warren responded.
CRYING.
I love that Kernan brought up profit margins. Any time Warren posts something about price gouging I respond with tweets from Scott Lincicome showing a small profit margin for grocery stores.
Kernen later called the effort a “fool’s errand” noting that grocery stores have much smaller profit margins than in other industries like technology. There would be no practical way to control prices across a supply chain without the cost coming back on the consumer, he said. Kernen also accused Harris, Warren, and others of focusing on “price gouging” to distract from other things driving inflation, like government spending.“How do you decide? This is not the government’s job to decide these things. It’s a fool’s errand. And also, you’re using it to divert the real cause of inflation over the last four years which is you had demand after the pandemic, which obviously there was a lot because reopened, and all of a sudden there are supply chain issues and the demand is juiced by all of this stimulus from the [Inflation Reduction Act] and all of the other spending that we did,” he said.“One of the causes of prices going up is there are companies that have market dominance that have said, oh, this is a moment when everyone is talking about —” Warren said before a frustrated Kernen cut in.“Okay, give me another one. Name another one. Give me an instance,” he said.
Spoiler: She couldn’t.
Kernen then brought up how Warren has alleged Kraft-Heinz “increased profits by 448% in 2022.”“Kraft, you say, was 440% profit increase. The example you used, the prior quarter from the year before, they had a charge of 1.3 billion dollars, an accounting change, which wiped out profits,” he said.Warren talked over the CNBC host again, and he asked her to let him complete his thoughts.“You didn’t let me finish. Look at the data. Come on. We have economic study after economic study,” she said.“This is the way you never lose an argument because no one can ever say anything back to you, Senator. It’s frustrating,” Kernen later said.
Kernen with the mic drop: “The cure for higher prices is when people come in and undercut those prices and supply goes back up. This has been since 1776!”
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