Sen. Bob Casey Suggests ‘We Should Give the Federal Government the Power’ to Control Prices

GEIST: “Senator, let me just read you a quick passage from a piece in The Washington Post this morning, an op-ed that writes, ‘It’s hard to exaggerate how bad the policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels, far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.’ Curious how you respond to that from The Washington Post, and who exactly decides when a price at the grocery store in Ohio is excessive?”
CASEY: “Well, it’s really not the grocery store level. This is at the corporate level, Willie. They’ve been making record profits. We’ve never seen the kinds of profits in corporate America the last couple of years. And when they’re doing that, they are bragging about increasing prices. So my point is that we should give the federal government the power to investigate just run-of-the-mill price gouging and give the people an opportunity to fight back against it. As I said, if they are not engaged in corporate price gouging, they have nothing to worry about. But this is, I think, long overdue. People are tired of just accepting higher prices. Now, consumers obviously have a lot of power here, and because I’ve pointed it out for the better part of nine or 10 months now, people are putting pressure, and some of that public pressure is working on some of these big corporations. But, look, they have had it pretty good. They got — they got the biggest tax cut imaginable, along with the billionaires. That’s why they are attacking me in this campaign. They know I won’t vote for their tax cuts and they also know that I’m not going to give up on prosecuting this case on corporate price gouging. And people get it.”