This Week in David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and Bari Weiss Don't Care About American Democracy (11/6)
David Shasha
Insurrection Forever: Douthat and Brooks Go Viva Trump Troll the Libs with Bari Weiss
When I saw Idiot Jews for Jesus Brooks’ Friday column, I was all set to write 2500 words – and felt exhausted and decided to let it go.
No one knows what will happen this Tuesday, whether we will ever have a Free and Fair Election in this country ever again, and whether the White Christian Fascists will have their way.
Brooks, the Smartest Guy in the Room at all times, decided to make the Election about Class Warfare:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/opinion/democrats-midterms-college.html
Karl Marx lives!
And then there is Catholic First Things Fascist Ross Douthat, who chose to both support Trump and attack – again! – Vatican II:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/05/opinion/2022-election-democrat-republican.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/opinion/vatican-ii-catholics.html
All three articles follow this note – read them at your peril!
In case you are wondering, Douthat’s Anti-Semitism slip is showing.
But I suppose we already knew that – just as we know that The Tikvah Fund is all in with the New Fascism and its Anti-Semitic values.
We already know the Tikvah Trumpscum strategy: Never mention Trump or the Alt-Right Sedition and the Racism and Violence, just stick to Trolling the Libs and pretend that we are living in “normal” times.
Douthat’s screeds are par for the course – we know whose side he is on.
He is in the Tikvah Trumpscum Bari Weiss camp, which is apparently a very lucrative business:
Common Sense without Common Sense is hiring!
Fascist Violence is very good for business.
Indeed, on Shabbat we were informed of one more of her “discussions” from inside the sealed Neo-Con echo-chamber:
Here are the hardcore Right Wing participants:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/03/26/mary-katharine-ham-is-not-here-to-entertain-you/
https://wwsg.com/speakers/josh-kraushaar/
No Free Speech for Weiss, just more Straussians.
Getting back to David Brooks, you will be interested to hear that the main problem of the current electorate is Class Struggle.
The Democrats are losing the battle to the Corporate Republicans!
Brooks is so tone-deaf in his Reaganism that it is hard to stomach.
I would like to point out that the current Inflation is due to Brooks’ beloved CEOs:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/opinion/us-companies-inflation.html
The complete article follows this note.
Not that it should come as a surprise that the Democrats remain with working people and the Trumpublicans are for FTP:
https://acasignups.net/15/01/30/republican-party-makes-it-official-fck-poor-and-working-class
Just die, and get it over with.
Moscow Mitch, Cancun Cruz, and the rest of them will salute you:
But Science and Rationality are not for David Brooks.
Again, we do not know what is going to happen on Tuesday, but we do very much know that David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and Bari Weiss do not give a damn about American Democracy and the wellbeing of all our citizens.
Viva Trump 2024!
David Shasha
Why Aren’t the Democrats Trouncing the Republicans?
By: David Brooks
My big takeaway from this election season would be this: We’re about where we were. We entered this election season with a nearly evenly divided House and Senate in which the Democrats had a slight advantage. We’ll probably leave it with a nearly evenly divided House and Senate in which the Republicans have a slight advantage. But we’re about where we were.
Nothing the parties or candidates have done has really changed this underlying balance. The Republicans nominated a pathetically incompetent Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, in Georgia, but polls show that race is basically tied. The Democrats nominated a guy in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke and has trouble communicating, but polls show that that Senate race is basically tied.
After all the campaigning and the money and the shouting, the electoral balance is still on a razor’s edge.
What accounts for this? It’s the underlying structure of society. Americans are sorting themselves out by education into two roughly equal camps. As people without a college degree have flocked to the G.O.P., people with one have flocked to the Democrats.
“Education polarization is not merely an American phenomenon,” Eric Levitz writes in New York magazine, “it is a defining feature of contemporary politics in nearly every Western democracy.”
Over the past few years, the Democrats have made heroic efforts to win back working-class voters and white as well as Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted rightward. Joe Biden’s domestic agenda is largely about this: infrastructure jobs, expanded child tax credit, raising taxes on corporations. This year the Democrats nominated candidates designed to appeal to working-class voters, like the sweatshirt-wearing Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Tim Ryan in Ohio.
It doesn’t seem to be working. As Ruy Teixeira, Karlyn Bowman and Nate Moore noted in a survey of polling data for the American Enterprise Institute last month, “The gap between non-college and college whites continues to grow.” Democrats have reason to worry about losing working-class Hispanic voters in places like Nevada. “If Democrats can’t win in Nevada,” one Democratic pollster told Politico, “we can complain about the white working class all you want, but we’re really confronting a much broader working-class problem.” Even Black voters without a college degree seem to be shifting away from the Democrats, to some degree.
Forests have been sacrificed so that Democratic strategists can write reports on why they are losing the working class. Some believe racial resentment is driving the white working class away. Some believe Democrats spend too much time on progressive cultural issues and need to focus more on bread-and-butter economics.
I’d say these analyses don’t begin to address the scale of the problem. America has riven itself into two different cultures. It’s very hard for the party based in one culture to reach out and win voters in the other culture — or even to understand what people in the other culture are thinking.
As I’ve shuttled between red and blue America over decades of reporting on American politics, I’ve seen social, cultural, moral and ideological rifts widen from cracks to chasms.
Politics has become a religion for a lot of people. Americans with a college education and Americans without a college education no longer just have different ideas about, say, the role of government; they have created rival ways of life. Americans with a college education and Americans without a college education have different relationships to patriotism and faith, dress differently, enjoy different foods and have different ideas about corporal punishment, gender and, of course, race.
You can’t isolate the differences between the classes down to one factor or another. It’s everything.
But even that is not the real problem. America has always had vast cultural differences. Back in 2001, I wrote a long piece for The Atlantic comparing the deeply blue area of Montgomery County, Md., with the red area of Franklin County in south-central Pennsylvania.
I noted the vast socioeconomic and cultural differences that were evident, even back then. But in my interviews, I found there was a difference without a ton of animosity.
For example, Ted Hale was a Presbyterian minister there. “There’s nowhere near as much resentment as you would expect,” he told me. “People have come to understand that they will struggle financially. It’s part of their identity. But the economy is not their god. That’s the thing some others don’t understand. People value a sense of community far more than they do their portfolio.”
Back in those days I didn’t find a lot of class-war consciousness in my trips through red America. I compared the country to a high school cafeteria. Jocks over here, nerds over there, punks somewhere else. Live and let live.
Now people don’t just see difference; they see menace. People have put up barricades and perceive the other class as a threat to what is beautiful, true and good. I don’t completely understand why this animosity has risen over the past couple of decades, but it makes it very hard to shift the ever more entrenched socio-economic-cultural-political coalitions.
Historians used to believe that while European societies were burdened by ferocious class antagonisms, Americans had relatively little class consciousness. That has changed.
From The New York Times, November 4, 2022
In 2022, Reality Has a Conservative Bias
By: Ross Douthat
“Reality,” Stephen Colbert remarked at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006, “has a well-known liberal bias.” That was back when he played a caricature of a conservative instead of a caricature of a liberal (I assume that’s the point of his current late-night role, at least), and the line rolled out brilliantly into the midst of a decade where reality was delivering some punishing blows to the Republican Party’s theories of the world.
In that period, the years from the invasion of Iraq through the re-election of Barack Obama, the G.O.P. staked itself to the conceit that the Iraq war would disarm a dictator (the armaments in question mostly did not exist) and revolutionize the Middle East (it did, but not for the better). It staked its domestic policy on tax cuts and a housing bubble, touting the strength of the George W. Bush-era economy right up to the point when the worst financial crisis since the 1920s hit.
Then in Obama’s first term, the G.O.P. staked itself to the claims that deficit spending and easy money would lead to runaway inflation or debt crisis (they did not), that Obamacare would wreck the health care market (flaws and all, it didn’t), that entitlement reform was an appropriate prescription in a slowly recovering economy (it was a good long-term goal but not an ideal 2010 priority). And as a small capstone, the G.O.P. assumed that the polls were skewed against Mitt Romney in 2012, which they emphatically were not.
I was a participant in some of this, overestimating the urgency of the deficit problem and the risks of Obamacare. So I have experience from which to observe that the Democrats in 2022 find themselves struggling because reality has finally changed sides, and now has a conservative bias.
What has reality delivered? To a Democratic Party that convinced itself there were few near-term limits on how much stimulus could be pumped into the economy, it has delivered the worst inflation since the 1980s.
To a Democratic Party that spent the Trump era talking itself into a belief that immigration enforcement is presumptively immoral and that a de facto amnesty doesn’t have real downsides, it has delivered the southern border’s highest-recorded rate of illegal crossings.
And to a Democratic Party whose 2020 platform promised to “end the era of mass incarceration and dramatically reduce the number of Americans held in jails and prisons while continuing to reduce crime rates,” it has delivered a multiyear spike in homicide rates that’s erased at least 20 years of gains.
The key thing to stress about all of these developments is that they don’t prove that liberals are simply “wrong about crime” or “wrong about inflation,” any more than the events of 2003-12 simply proved that conservatives are “wrong about foreign policy” or “wrong about entitlements.”
Rather, ideological and partisan commitments exist in a dynamic relationship with reality. You can get things right for a while, sometimes a long while, and then suddenly you pass a tipping point and your prescription starts delivering the downsides that your rivals warned about and that you convinced yourself did not exist.
Thus in the current situation, the fact that right now America is suffering a serious crime wave doesn’t prove that Democrats (and many Republicans) were wrong about criminal justice reform 10 or 15 years ago. It just suggests that there’s a point at which de-carceration or decriminalization may need a tough-on-crime corrective.
Likewise Democrats weren’t wrong about the risks of inflation being low in the Obama era or in the recent past. It’s just that except for a few Cassandras like Larry Summers they were wrong to imagine that those risks could be forever minimized, that there was no upper bound on Covid-era spending. In the same way today’s inflation doesn’t retrospectively vindicate the Obama era’s deficit hawks — but it does suggest that some of their proposals might be worth revisiting.
So the question for the aftermath of Tuesday’s election isn’t whether Democrats will abandon their ideology but whether that ideology can adapt itself to what reality is saying.
And whether for Joe Biden or for his possible successors, a recent model is available: Just after the era when Colbert’s quip had bite, a leader emerged who persuaded the G.O.P. to abandon its fixation on deficits and just run the economy hot, who endorsed universal health insurance and pledged to protect entitlements, and who acknowledged that the Iraq war had been a grave mistake and promised a less utopian, more realistic foreign policy.
That’s right: It was Donald Trump who closed the gap — in rhetoric, if not always in his eventual policymaking — between the Republican Party and reality. Now the Democrats, facing a cold rendezvous with reality’s conservative bias, need leaders who can do the same.
From The New York Times, November 5, 2022
How Vatican II Failed Catholics — and Catholicism
By: Ross Douthat
A couple of years ago at a party, I fell into a conversation with a friendly older gentleman, an Irish American of the Baby Boom generation and the greater tristate area. At some point, the discussion turned to family life and the challenges of dragging complaining kids to church, and I said something in passing about the Sunday Obligation, meaning the requirement laid on Catholics to attend Mass on pain of serious sin.
He looked at me with a friendly sort of mystification. “Oh,” he said, “but you know the church got rid of that after Vatican II?”
I didn’t really argue with him. Catholicism was deep in his bones, he had been educated by nuns once upon a time, who was I to tell him what his faith really teaches?
But I think about that encounter, and others like it, as intensely relevant to my column from a few weeks ago — on the failure of the Second Vatican Council to equip the church for the challenges of late modernity, the way its reforms aimed at resilience but led to crisis and diminishment instead.
What I tried to emphasize there, with some nods to the work of the French historian Guillaume Cuchet, was that the problem with Vatican II probably wasn’t any given change, any specific controversy that followed — whether over religious liberty or the use of the vernacular in the liturgy or the moral status of artificial birth control. It was instead the sheer scale of the changes, the evisceration of a whole “culture of obligatory practice” (Cuchet’s phrase), which severed various threads binding people to the faith, undermined confidence that the church really knew what it was doing and made people more dismissive of the obligations that officially remained.
The question of Sunday Mass-going is a good example. Technically, the church never said what my friendly interlocutor believed, never lifted the weekly obligation. But when an array of customs that reinforced that obligation were relaxed, from the requirement to fast before Mass to the emphasis on regular confession, the tacit message was the one he received — that the time of stringent rules was over, that henceforth the church would be defined by a more, well, American sort of flexibility.
The idea was not simply to make Catholicism easier, of course; the hope was that a truer Christianity would flourish once rote obedience diminished. But the policy and the results, not the hopes, are what we should be interested in three generations later. And in and of itself, a policy of easing burdens was hardly a crazy idea of how the church might adapt to modernity and keep Catholics in the pews. Spiritual issues aside, from an institutional perspective, you can see the logic of saying, the world is making it harder to be a Catholic, so let’s make it easier to practice the faith.
Indeed, I will say that the relaxed style of the contemporary church offers useful concessions to my own situation as a busy professional juggling an assortment of secular obligations for myself and my family, and operating in numerous environments — familial, social and professional — where many people aren’t Catholics.
But I’m also an unusual case: a teenage convert and a convert’s son, an overly intellectualized believer, a bit of a weirdo in my mixture of laxness and literalism.
For most people, Catholic faith isn’t an idea you’ve chosen that then has corollaries in practice (like get to Mass on Sunday). It’s an inheritance that you get handed and have to decide what to do with. And the foundational problem with the keep-people-Catholic-by-making-it-easier-to-be-Catholic approach, it turns out, is that it removes too many of the signals indicating that this part of your inheritance is important — essential — rather than something you can keep without really investing in it, for yourself or, when the time comes, for your kids.
From this perspective, a key obstacle to getting modern Catholics to actually practice their inherited Catholicism isn’t whether they disagree with church teachings or feel adequately welcomed (as much as those issues matter). It’s that the church is in competition with a million other urgent-seeming things, and in its post-Vatican II form it has often failed to establish the importance of its own rituals and obligations.
For example, my guess would be that more American Catholics skip Mass because of the demands of youth sports, the felt need for a more relaxed “family time” or the competing pulls of work and entertainment than because of any theological or moral issue. And over time, this pattern compounds: The children of those families become couples who don’t bother to marry in the church and parents who don’t baptize their kids, and so decline continues because of cultural priorities rather than beliefs.
Right now, Catholic officialdom is engaged in a so-called synod on synodality, a series of listening sessions and bureaucratic confabs aimed at making the church more welcoming and inclusive — with a strong suspicion from conservatives that the endgame is further liberalizations of church doctrine.
I’m one of those suspicious conservatives, but I think the analysis of Vatican II I’m offering here points to a slightly different set of questions for the liberal Catholics who are having their hour under Pope Francis. Namely, which of their reforms would make the church seem more important to the semi-lapsed? How do you reach someone who doesn’t feel unwelcome at Mass but also doesn’t feel any kind of urgency about attending? If progressive Catholicism is in the business of lifting what it sees as nonessential obligations, hastening toward a possible future where one need not even be Catholic to receive communion in the Catholic Church, what form of obligation can it then instill?
The liberalizers don’t believe that a return to tradition suffices for the present challenge. Very well; as a non-traditionalist in my own practice, I’m evidence for their point. But what is the novel means, the welcoming and affirming 21st-century mechanism, whereby my friend from the party, the ancestral Catholic, can be persuaded that it really, truly matters whether he shows up to Sunday Mass?
Any potential recovery of Catholic vitality under the Pope Francis model, any future where the revolution of Vatican II is somehow vindicated after all, hinges above all on the answer to that question.
Of course, all of the foregoing assumes my original premise, that Catholic decline since Vatican II is so substantial as to undermine various attempts (by John Paul II conservatives as well as liberals) to treat the council as a great success. But the premise itself is certainly contested. For instance, by Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, a key Francis ally and possible successor, who recently told a Spanish newspaper, “if we did not have that point of reform that was the Second Vatican Council, the church today would be a small sect, unknown to most people.”
I’ll grant that Roman Catholicism isn’t “unknown” in the current era. But in Hollerich’s region of Europe (he is the archbishop of Luxembourg), it already is a “small sect” by the standards of the past: Some reports have put Mass attendance among self-identified Catholics in Germany at around 9 percent, and around 5 percent among Dutch and French Catholics, all part of a steep multigenerational decline. Any secular organization that conducted a sweeping renewal effort that yielded such results would know exactly what to think; any claim that but for those reforms we’d be at 1 percent rather than 5 percent would not be taken seriously.
For a more detailed, less facially implausible argument, I recommend this Twitter thread from David Gibson, the director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture, replying to my column. His strongest argument is about the post-Vatican II vitality of Catholicism outside of the West. This vitality is primarily visible in sub-Saharan Africa, where Catholicism has grown dramatically as the continent’s population has boomed, without the dramatic falling-off that you see elsewhere. Is this due to Vatican II enabling, as Gibson puts it, the “promotion of inculturation and vernacular liturgies,” rather than a stuffy Eurocentric Latin? Or is it part of a wider exceptionalism in much of sub-Saharan Africa to conventional expectations about modernization and secularization, which would have obtained absent the council’s reforms? I don’t think we know, but I grant that the African story cries out for deeper study and complicates any critique of Vatican II.
But the exception is Africa, not, as Gibson suggests, some general “global South” that what he calls my “parochial” American perspective ignores. Yes, it’s likely that demographic momentum carried Catholic growth forward in some parts of the world even as the steep decline began in the West, but the patterns in Latin America are now similar to American and European patterns, except with more losses to Pentecostalism and evangelicalism. (Just between 2010 and 2020, in the pope’s native Argentina, the share of Catholic identifiers went from 76 percent to 49 percent of the population.) The post-1960s collapse is worst in Western Europe, but the failure of renewal is evident almost everywhere that Catholicism was well-established before the council.
Then Gibson’s other points are less convincing: He accuses me of lacking “a sense of history” for not acknowledging that the challenges facing the church run deeper than the council. But my column explicitly stated that some version of Vatican II was necessary, that its unfortunate failure does not prove the church could have just continued as it was without facing some sort of crisis, some shock or decline.
He argues that American Catholicism has been “surprisingly resilient” and that “it is likely that the reforms that followed Vatican II enlivened the church in the U.S. considerably and continue to bear fruit.” But American resilience arguably cuts against his argument, since progressive Catholics frequently argue that Catholicism in the United States remains too traditionalist, hidebound, even “integralist,” that it hasn’t gone far enough in the true implementation of Vatican II.
He invokes the chaos that followed past councils to say that by my lights quite a few would have to be “reckoned a failure,” and yes, I think some of them were. Does anyone believe, for instance, that the Fifth Lateran Council of 1512-17 needs to be held up as a great work of the Holy Spirit when it clearly failed to do anything useful to prevent the Protestant Reformation that began the year it ended? Even the Council of Trent plainly failed in some of its objectives, since it did not reconcile Lutherans or re-Catholicize Northern Europe or prevent the Thirty Years’ War. (Though if you believe the current condition of Western Catholic practice and culture will someday be favorably compared to the saints and artists and theologians of the Counter-Reformation era, I have a bridge between the Vatican and Jerusalem I’d like to sell you.)
Finally, Gibson concludes, “at some point a Catholic has to believe that a Council (or synod) is at some level a work of the Spirit and not simply a partisan campaign pitting one agenda against another. That is literally un-Catholic and leads only to cynicism, and bad takes.” I agree with the “at some level” part; for instance, I think you can see the Holy Spirit at work in the Second Vatican Council’s effect on Catholic-Jewish relations alone. But I emphatically don’t agree with the implication that councils and synods can’t be judged and found wanting in their most important practical effects. I doubt Gibson believes this either — unless he takes a very different perspective on, say, the medieval crusades and the councils that encouraged them than the median liberal Catholic.
Ultimately, the business of the Catholic Church is to save souls, to serve Jesus Christ and to manifest the presence of God through its holiness and beauty. And as I said in the column, and I’ll say again: What really breeds cynicism is when the church behaves like the Soviet empire in its dotage and demands constant encomiums to the wisdom and success of a now decades-old renewal project, when everyone can plainly see it’s presiding over crisis and decline.
From The New York Times, November 4, 2022
Corporate Profiteering Is the Culprit for Inflation
By: Lindsay Owens
Last fall, as container ships piled up outside the Port of Los Angeles, it looked as if inflation was going to be with us for longer than many had predicted. Curious how C.E.O.s were justifying higher prices, my team and I started listening in on hundreds of earnings calls, where, by law, companies have to tell the truth. While official statistics on inflation such as the Consumer Price Index can tell you that prices are rising, earnings calls provide rich, qualitative data that speak to why and how.
Executives from the nation’s largest publicly traded companies had a lot to report to their shareholders about supply chain snarls, product shortages and rising prices — mostly that they were very good for business. What was striking in the earnings calls was not the supply chain shortages or companies’ typical profit motives; it was the plain old corporate profiteering. The Economics 101 adage that “inflation is just too much money chasing too few goods” doesn’t come close to the full story. This raises the question: When companies are exploiting consumers in a time of national crisis, when should government step in?
Companies that historically might have kept prices low to pick up profit by gaining additional market share are instead using the cover of inflation to raise prices and increase profits. Consumers are now expecting higher prices at the checkout line, and companies are taking advantage. The poor and those on fixed incomes are hit the hardest.
As Hostess’s C.E.O. told shareholders last quarter, “When all prices go up, it helps.” The head of research for the bank Barclay’s echoed this. “The longer inflation lasts and the more widespread it is, the more air cover it gives companies to raise prices,” he told Bloomberg. More than half of retailers admitted as much when surveyed.
Executives on their earnings calls crowed to investors about their blockbuster quarterly profits. One credited his company’s “successful pricing strategies.” Another patted his team on the back for a “marvelous job in driving price.” These executives weren’t just passing along their rising costs; they were going for more. Or as one C.F.O. put it, they were “not leaving any pricing on the table.”
The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, said that sometimes businesses are raising prices just “because they can.” He’s right. Companies have pricing power when consumers don’t have choice. Sometimes this is because demand for consumer staples like toilet paper, toothpaste and hamburger meat is relatively inelastic. If you need a box of diapers, you need a box of diapers. Other times pricing power comes from concentrated market power. In industries like meatpacking and shipping — in which giants have over 80 percent of market share at times — it’s easier to take big markups when there aren’t major competitors to undercut you.
What we learned on these earnings calls was quickly reflected in data. Despite the rising costs of labor, energy and materials, profit margins reached 70-year highs in 2021. And according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, fatter profit margins, not the rising costs of labor and materials, drove more than half of price increases in the nonfinancial corporate sector since the start of the Covid pandemic.
Despite clear evidence that a majority of price increases are not justified by rising costs, there is a fierce debate in Washington about what, if anything, policymakers should do to address it. This debate primarily stems not from questions about the cause of price increases but from differing viewpoints on whether policymakers should play a role in ensuring fair and just prices.
Most economists believe that markets are efficient allocators of scarcity and that governments should have little, if any, role in guarding against unfair pricing. They argue that price hikes will help cool demand and alleviate scarcity by efficiently rationing goods by consumers’ ability to pay. If sellers take price hikes too far, customers will just go to a competitor across the street. But what if there are no competitors? Not to worry: Truly exorbitant markups will all but guarantee new businesses entering the market. Many economists even argue that publicly traded companies have an obligation to shareholders to bring in as much profit as possible. If they see any interventionist role of government, it is in suppressing demand through interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, a blunt policy tool with a high likelihood of throwing the country into a recession.
On the other side of the debate are a majority of Americans, including me, who look at the economy and see businesses exploiting supply chain bottlenecks, foreign war and a pandemic to bring in record profits on the backs of consumers. We don’t dispute that the system is working well for Fortune 500 companies and Wall Street investors, but we want lawmakers to stop the profiteering that has gone too far.
Although economists may not like to admit it, prices are not immune from political considerations. In fact, 38 states and the District of Columbia already limit price increases on certain goods through price-gouging statutes designed to prevent companies from capitalizing on abnormal disruptions, like pandemics and hurricanes, that lend themselves to scarcity and price gouging. In other words, the bulk of state legislatures have decided that although shareholders might like to see bottled water sold for $100 a gallon and gas for $5 after a hurricane, that is neither fair nor in the public interest.
Lawmakers must do even more. They should pursue a federal price-gouging statute to give regulators the authority to stop companies from exploiting crises to wring out more profit. Last week, Democrats in Congress announced plans to do just that. They could go further to discourage profiteering through the tax code — whether by increasing the corporate tax rate or by imposing excess-profits taxes like those proposed by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Bernie Sanders. This is not new; the government took similar action during times like World War II and as recently as 1980 for oil and gas. Regulators, even without new legislation, should start by enforcing existing laws, including ones against price fixing, price gouging and collusion.
The supply shocks we are experiencing are just a dress rehearsal for those to come. Climate change will bring increasingly severe and frequent disasters that wipe out crops, flood manufacturing plants and disrupt trade routes. The White House Council of Economic Advisers admitted as much in its latest annual Economic Report of the President. More scarcity will undoubtedly bring more opportunities for profiteering, and policymakers need to close their introductory economics textbooks and actually look at the economy. The question we should be asking is not whether companies will exploit those disruptions — we know they will — but what we can do to stop it, or else companies will just make the rest of us pay the price.
Ms. Owens is the executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative.
From The New York Times, November 5, 2022