Created Equal: Why are prices still high in America?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chains across the world were disrupted. Factors like heightened demand, trade restrictions and factory closures created a rise in the price of goods. While global supply chains have had time to recover in the past few years, the cost of living is still higher than ever for Americans.

Companies were able to gouge prices during the pandemic because people were desperate for goods that were low in stock. When paired with market concentration, the extreme rise in the price of goods has been maintained, if not heightened. 

Market concentration occurs when industries are dominated by few companies. These industries do not have to compete with the prices of other companies to attract customers, so they have free reign to raise their prices regardless of demand. This means that companies in the post-pandemic era are able to set their prices based on their desire for profit, not consumer demand.

Bilal Baydoun recently appeared before the Senate Banking Committee to talk about corporate price gouging. He joined Created Equal on Wednesday to discuss the corporate greed that’s infringing on Americans’ wallets.

Guest:

Bilal Baydoun is the director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. He says that a way to redistribute large companies’ profits is to re-impose high taxes on corporations. 

“We have an age-old system of taking profits and making sure that they’re distributed to the country — to infrastructure [and] to things that give us a functioning country [like] social support [and] childcare,” Baydoun said. “Of course, the largest companies in this country don’t really pay taxes. At the federal level, a lot of them don’t pay very much in tax. This is largely due to the Trump tax reform in 2017. But of course, corporate taxation has been declining for quite some time. So, I think taxing corporations would be a major disincentive to pursue some of these tactics that we’re talking about.”

Listen to Created Equal with host Stephen Henderson weekdays from 9-10 a.m. ET on Detroit Public Radio 101.9 WDET and streaming on-demand.