“Congress has stalled out on doing work that it could do to help families lower costs," Sen. Warren tells TIME. "The President has the tools to fight back.”
The prices legitimately went up due to supply chain constraints during the pandemic. The problem is, they never went back down, and then continued to follow the steep inflation trends of a post-pandemic nation. That all just became additional revenue for the food industry.
The last time a President signed an Executive Order to fix grocery prices, it blew up in Nixon’s face when it expired and prices blew well past what should have been a consistent inflation trend.
The only way the government could successfully address it would be through congressional legislation, by either establishing a legal rate of inflation for food products, or finally breaking up the big food monopolies. There’s just no way Republicans would ever go for any of it.
They're perfectly capable. About half just don't want to.
I don't know how to convince people to vote for ourselves instead of hate. I don't know how to get people to vote for solutions, even imperfect ones, over someone to blame.
But if you figure it out, these are the kinds of problems we can go about solving.
Grocery prices dropping by half would be amazing. I would be interested in learning what he has done for grocery prices and why congress feels the need to ask him to do something about it if he has supposedly done so much already.
They don't really want to investigate because much of the blame will boomerang onto them. For example, the Inflation Reduction Act they passed was strongly inflationary. It had a lot of good and important objectives, but the huge spending increases were not matched by an increase in taxation, resulting in inflation.
So they're left clutching at straws, like complaining about greedy grocery stores (as though Walmart wasn't greedy during the 2010s when inflation was quiescent, and suddenly became greedy now).