Study Shows Corporate Price Gouging At Worst Level Since The 50's

A new study from the Roosevelt Institute has found that corporate price gouging is at its worst level since the 1950's, bolstering the need for a corporate windfall tax even more. The fact that this is allowed to happen without Congress taking any action is absolutely absurd, and Americans are continuing to get squeezed by corporate profiteers without any reprieve. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

According to a new report from the Roosevelt Institute, price gouging among corporations. And I will define what they consider to be price. Gouging has now risen in the past year to the highest level we have seen in this country since the 1950s. And of course, price gouging itself is what they're calling the difference between what these companies, corporations, whatever it is, whatever they have to pay for their raw materials and production costs versus what they're selling their products for. Yes, we've had inflation, but if inflation rose, you know, this much, they still rose their, uh, uh, raise their prices. Excuse me, this much. It's quite simple to figure out here they release their earning sheets, these public corporations, we're able to see what they're charging people. We're able to see what they have to pay for it. And we can see the difference, determine those percentages.

That's what the folks at Roosevelt Institute did. And they determined that we have not seen price gouging this bad in this country since the 1950s. And that was just by the way for year 2021, we do not have all the numbers in for 2022 yet for very obvious reasons. We're, you know, only halfway through the year. And I guarantee you, this year's numbers are gonna be worse than the previous year. And at the same time that this price gouging has hit a 70 year high. You know what else has hit a 70 year high folks, corporate profits, corporate profits. If it really was inflation, that was driving up our prices, corporate profits wouldn't be moving. They would still be high, but they wouldn't be rising because they would only be passing on the inflation costs to us. But instead, we're also having to pay their, uh, what do we call it? Gouge FFL.

I guess that's a good name for it because that's what's happening here. And of course, this is also why you have more and more Americans of majority of them, by the way, who now support a corporate windfall profits tax. They want to reign in this corporate price, gouging politicians, a little scared to do that. Instead we have people like Larry Summers who says, no, no, no, no, no. The only way we can flight fight inflation is to, you know, get back to 5% unemployment. So people, sorry, you gotta lose your jobs. And we gotta bring wages down a little bit. That's what Larry summer said. That's what Larry Summers said this week. We gotta have more people not

Working. And then we gotta lower everybody's wages, nothing about corporate price, gouging, nothing about reigning in this out of control capitalistic system we have that is killing us instead. It's oh, I'm sorry, workers. You're just gonna have to make less money. And some of you just really need to quit your jobs and go sit at home. That's what they want to do. They don't wanna address the actual causes of this crisis. They would rather continue to screw us over these elites like Larry Summers, because God forbid we do anything to actually punish corporations who have been screwing us over for decades. And we're now getting screwed over at a rate that most of us have not ever seen in our lifetimes, cuz it's been 70 years since corporate greed was this bad in America.