Thanksgiving is in our rearview mirror, but the rising inflation that drove dinner costs higher this year is sticking around. There are a number of reasons that prices are rising rapidly from the grocery to the gas pump.
Now, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren wants us to swallow the excuse that price-gouging by turkey farmers is the reason your bird cost more this year. Sorry, senator, but no one is swallowing it.
The story
Just before Thanksgiving, Warren sent a letter to the Justice Department demanding an investigation into poultry companies’ price increases ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday:
Given the apparent connection between rising poultry prices for consumers and the history of anticompetitive practices in the poultry industry, I ask that you open a broad investigation into the impact of price-fixing, wage-fixing, and consolidation in the poultry industry on consumers and farmers.
Turkey prices are up anywhere from 2 – 24 percent depending on the measure you use, but so are prices across the economy.
As we have reported, in October food prices were up 5.3 percent from this time last year with significant double-digit price increases on meats, poultry, fish, and eggs. Turkeys alone are not the only items that Americans are spending more money on. Will Warren send the DOJ to every food producer in the country to investigate their price increases? And to what end?
This is really a distraction and a misguided, feeble attempt at pretending to be doing something about inflation.
What’s driving inflation?
A poultry farmer recently explained all of the rising costs they face which is feeding into turkey prices.
Rising fuel costs, input price increases, supply-chain disruptions, and worker shortages along with massive federal spending that rewards workers for remaining on the sidelines are driving prices higher.
These are truths that Warren would rather not acknowledge or address, either because she doesn’t have any ideas to address them or because it would be an admission that Washington is sending the nation down the wrong path.
As the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board wrote:
You know Democrats are desperate when they have to invent a new example of business collusion for the soaring price of meat. We’re supposed to imagine the fat and happy execs from Big Poultry sitting around a table, or maybe on a Zoom call, saying here’s the plan: We’ll stick it to our customers by raising prices on staples for the one day of the year that will really infuriate them. Great idea. Yeah, let’s do it.
Ms. Warren may have taught law at Harvard, but she apparently thinks Americans are stupid.
Americans are not stupid which is why a plurality of voters say that the multi-trillion-dollar tax-and-spend bill will only make inflation worse, not better. Perhaps, the senator should turn her attention to the policies she voted for and how they are backfiring on American families.