So the attorney general can open an investigation on this asshat profiteering off of hand sanitizer but when it comes to companies price gouging in the wake of the pandemic we get this limp dick response? Sure I’m glad he said something but we need more
Apparently a state of emergency needs to have been declared for them to actually do anything about price gouging directly.
I read about it when Southwest airlines went completely down for a week last year over the holidays and I was stranded somewhere. Other airlines had astronomical prices and car rentals were over $500 for one day. It was disgusting. But apparently there was nothing to be done.
They need to change the rules surrounding it because they’re not working. But any amount of government intervention in the economy gets conservatives screaming about “communism,” or socialism, or whatever scapegoat they’re using that day that they don’t know the actual definition of. And yet, if there’s no government intervention in the economy it’s “Biden’s not doing enough/Biden is personally raising gas prices every week” etc.
Of course there wasn’t a single peep from them when Trump was fucking shit up, other than those “this is Biden’s America” memes when Biden hadn’t even taken office yet and the photos were a year old. Nothing will get done about it as long as conservatives have any say in congress. But they’ll always be the one’s complaining and pointing the finger at “the libruls” while profiting.
Corporations: “Make us.”
Biden: “no”
How could Biden make them do it?
Why would he even be willing to?
This is a bad faith argument.
Corporations: “or what?”
He’s gonna blast em, and they will officially be On Notice
Ooo he might even slam them!
He’ll make a tweet that starts with “Let me be clear…”.
Old man wags his finger.
Old man yells at cloud, functionally.
Corporations: lol no
He probably went to go buy his own ice cream for the first time in 3 years and said “holy shit.”
Any legislation to go with that or are you just asking nicely?
I’d be surprised if even saying this didn’t have political ramifications. There’s nothing, besides; military budget, tax breaks to millionaires, and their own pay raises, that would get through both houses of Congress right now.
Asking nicely is at least virtue signaling, maybe it’ll be something we can address if a couple R’s ever see the consequences of their illegal actions.
L-O-L
He could threaten to cancel federal contracts with any vendor found to be price gouging. That would have actual ramifications and doesn’t require Congress.
The president isn’t powerless here. He just wants credit for purely performative actions.
The price gouging is mainly coming from consumer facing markets, not government contracts. Even with discretionary spending there isn’t that much that pure executive branch actions can do to dissuade the price gouging that we’ve been seeing.
Well to be fair, there is A LOT of price gouging from government contracts, but they just print the money for it so they don’t REALLY care.
Yup.
If the President threatened to void federal contracts, you’d see immediate change.
But the president doesn’t work for us.
void federal contracts
I’m sure Walmart and Chipotle are shaking in their boots. I guess a president DID get McDonald’s delivered to the White House once.
Never fails to amuse me the extent to which people make excuses for the leader of the free world.
I agree. Angry orange man was known for pushing every single loophole to make bad things happen.
If Joebob wanted to actually do something about it, he’d find a way to work it through the system. Isn’t that the point of politics??
I despise Trump, but yes, I’d love to see a Democratic president who is actually willing to wield power.
Would also be nice to see 49% of voters no longer content to make excuses and vote Green instead.
In presidential systems like the US has legislation originates from congress. The President only has veto power over legislation, and controls the enforcement of existing legislation. They can’t force congress to create new legislation, though of course they can propose legislation (anyone can do that). This is very different from parliamentary systems where the Prime Minister is the head of the majority party of the parliament, and can thus directly propose legislation and get their party to support it.
He added, “come on, man”
Oh shit, he means business.
“My good friends in congress will, well they uh, I mean titwinkle, and corn pop was a bad dude!”
Corporations after seeing how Black Friday netted over $9.8 billion: Uhhhh…no. According to these numbers, people LoVe the prices!
That was $10b in online sales, not total.
That’s almost 10 billion of sale prices though, for products they literally needed to offload.
And while a record amount, it was only 7.5% above normal, coming off all this Covid stuff it’s no wonder people are cutting loose and splurging a bit.
7.5% … Wasn’t that the rate of inflation recently as well? Not sure what it is at now, but we were getting up there. Higher prices wouldn’t necessarily mean a new record, I am guessing.
As far as I can tell it’s just people being “savvy” and waiting for the big sale day.
Black Friday e-commerce spending popped 7.5% from a year earlier, reaching a record $9.8 billion in the U.S., according to an Adobe Analytics report, a further indication that price-conscious consumers want to spend on the best deals and are hunting for those deals online.
Not the current rate of inflation. Inflation over the year from October 2022 - October 2023 was 3.2%.
To get to 7.5% you’d have to go back to the year from November 2021 to November 2022.
Our month to month inflation is currently about flat, meaning there was no change in prices from September 2023 to October 2023. But sometimes there’s a jump one month or a drop the next, it’s a little uneven, which is why people talk about the entire past year summed up. It’s a confusing way to phrase it though, because if you just say inflation was 3.2% in October, people often assume that means prices raised 3.2% in October. What it actually means is prices raised 3.2% over the entire past year altogether.
Anyways this is a true new record. People’s spending increases for black Friday are outpacing inflation.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/cpi-inflation-report-october-2023.html
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/
Above normal. The data suggests US citizens still have credit limit or not feeling the pinch as all the news articles suggest.
I was expecting a big decrease this year according to what I’ve seen on lemmy. From now on, I’ll read negative news and say “meh, probably not.”
It isn’t just lemmy, there’s plenty of external evidence showing that people think the economy is in a bad state. Changing your entire perspective because of big spending day on black Friday makes no sense.
Not just a big spending day, an all-time record-breaking spending day, up 7.5%. That’s absolutely insane and doesn’t jive. If everyone is hurting, can’t pay their rent and bills, credit is maxed out, then how did they also crush this record on inflation-priced “sales?”
All I’ve said, I’m choosing to go by data, not news agenda. BF helped me realize our economy is thriving. That’s great!
If prices are up because of inflation by 20% and you sell 7% more than you did last year then you actually sold less.
Same way every movie breaks records. They charge $20 for a ticket when it used to be $6.
You would need to see spending for the year to say anything definitive. They could all be pinching pennies waiting for deals and not spending normally the rest of the time.
We don’t know.
Also that number is online only and could just be again more people bought online than in person, meaning overall spending can atill be down. But also yeah inflation of prices really lets it look like each year is better even if you have less buyers overall.
Its a game of perspective. That people and corps are bery careful to play or else the casino runs dry.
Wealth gap. What you are actually saying is everyone is being squeezed, allowing corporations to sell less and make more.
This is why I’m kinda pissed off about it all. Americans all went shopping and kept spending as per usual, which allows corporations to report “green” to investors and continues to allow unbelievable CEO / executives wildly insane pay to continue.
Or they just know that Americans would rather go into significant debt, than having a lighter Christmas and/or buying less for a year or two.
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First of all “lighter” does not mean “sad”. I remember, growing up, there were a few years where our parents would tell us that Christmas was going to be a little “lighter” this year due to whatever financial reasons that they didn’t want to burden us with. They were lovely every time, and there was absolutely nothing “sad” about it.
Second, you are presenting a false choice:
So it’s sad Christmas and lots of debt, or regular to light Christmas and still crushing debt.
It could just be a financially responsible Christmas where you learn to appreciate your family and loved ones. People will often make homemade gifts instead of buying them, and those are often far more memorable than many pricier gifts.
As someone who has been consistently been paying down debt (student loans mostly, but some CC thrown in there), it hasn’t ever stopped me from enjoying Christmas.
And this is coming from someone who isn’t even really a big Christmas fan to begin with. It’s fine. I just think you presented an absurd dichotomy.
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I’m glad I have friends who can live without needing presents every year to feel validated on keeping a friendship alive.
I keep hearing other people just tear themselves apart because they worry about “ohhh I need to go shopping next week!” or “I can’t figure out what this person wants who barely gives a shit about me but I need to gift them SOMETHING!”
Like damn people, is it worth it that much to gift someone things at the cost of your own sustainability?
Windfall taxes
Actually do something about it you crypt keeper lookin ass fuck
Like what?
Oh cool. When is that passing the Senate?
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is cosponsoring the legislation in the Senate, and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) will introduce companion legislation in the House of Representatives.
It won’t pass, but if Biden can put the blame of it failing on Republicans it could help win elections.
That’s something realistic he could do. For an unrealistic but satisfying option, he could pick the worst offender and make that company an example. Send every OSHA, EPA, and IRS agent they can get to swarm the company and bury them in fines and legal actions.
Using agencies as weapons like that outside of their intended purpose is… despotic.
I don’t know that it’s wise to take attention away from the Republicans own clusterfuck to place it on something the Dems can’t get done.
I’m with you in spirit; I just think there are more layers to this than we tend to give it credit for.
I don’t think they meant “use agencies as bully goons.”
More like, those agencies are usually left under-resourced and under-staffed, so many companies flagrantly violate safety and employment laws because it’s more profitable to just make more money and pay off an unlikely fine if they get caught.
So, if you focused all the existing attention of those agencies on the worst companies, they’d find tons of legitimate lawbreaking going on, and hopefully punish the crap out of said company.
But, you know how it is “You stole how many millions in employee wages?!?.. that’s $25,000 penalty for you, company. Naughty naughty!”
Exactly, even if they do get caught, the fines are so goddamn low it’s barely worth it. A warehouse in my city got caught using 11-year-olds in their labor force, including having them driving forklifts. Their penalty? The kids can’t work there anymore and the company that owned the warehouse got a $30k fine.
It’s exactly what Republicans would do if they didn’t like a company. Playing nice with these people is what got us to this point.
Exactly. With apologies to Michelle Obama, “They go low, we go high!” does not work. It was never intended to work.
Democrats have a ton of sportsmanship trophies, and what do Republicans have? Well, they’ve got the SCOTUS, the House, and tons of State governments.
It’s despotic to direct agencies to perform the tasks they were specifically created to perform? I don’t think so.
It’s not something that Biden would realistically do or that I think should be done in this situation, but it is far from despotic.
Maybe add a pretty please in front of the request if he isn’t going to take any forceful action.
forceful action
like what? Or is the purpose of this just to make people mad, even when it doesn’t make sense.
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Pick the worst offender corporation, invite their whole executive board to DC, and when they arrive, guillotine them on the white house lawn.
…then repeat this request.
Dude, they are gouging because they want you gone so they can have more tax breaks. Fuck then over already.
Bad corpos!
*slaps them on the wrist
Corpos = “Slap me harder Daddy Biden! Tell me that I am destroying the middle and the working class for pursuit of increaseing shareholder value and increased profits.”
Stop slapping and start jailing. No teeth will never stop this.
Yeah! Say more words, Joe. That’ll teach em.
"If only my donors would pretty please stop that would be great. Consequences? We need to keep the elderly out of government, and ban lobbying. Until we do BOTH of those things, nothing will change and will only get worse. VOTE.
