What does a federal ban on price gouging look like? - eviltoast

The Harris-Walz campaign has said they want to create a federal ban on corporate price gouging (usually mentioned when folks talk about price hikes in grocery stores). I see economists complaining about variations of this policy being bad, e.g. leading to food desserts. But as far as I can tell there hasn’t been anything specific proposed. Could someone explain our best guess at what they are proposing, and if it’s been serious analyzed/tested elsewhere?

They cite existing legislation in the states; maybe explaining what that legislation does/how it works would be helpful?

  • Sundial@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    As President, she will direct her Administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers. And she will go after bad actors who exploit an emergency to rip off consumers by calling for the first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries, which will build on the anti-price gouging statutes already in place in 37 states.

    Based off this I would see a federal law that penalizes corporation for doing this kind of stuff. Whether or not she does and if the punishments would actually deter these corporations is another matter entirely. The other problem is that it always happens after the fact. To give an example, in Canada there was a big scandal where a huge Canadian retailer, Loblaws, was caught in a bread price-fixing scheme with some other food retailers and it’s parent company George Weston. After 14 years of reaping the benefits these companies whose revenue streams are in the tens of billions were fined only 500 million. It’s more or less a slap on the wrist and just the cost of doing business to these people.