That Costco’s hot dogs and pizza have risen in price so little (if any) in the last four years is probably because they are used as loss leaders. Mrs. FPD and I used to enjoy a slice or dog/sausage almost every time we shopped there. It constituted a cheap date the two years (2003-04) we had three kids in college. With the exception of eating at the outdoor food court in Kauai after loading up with a week’s worth of provisions, we’ve not eaten at a Costco since 1999.
Secondly, I strongly suspect that with the exception of a few spices and olive oil that all of the ingredients of Costco pizza and dogs (flour, pork, etc.) are domestically produced.
Thirdly, we no longer use the Costco pharmacy. We use a pharmacy that sells more of our prescriptions that are domestically produced. Why Americans would put Chinese products into their bodies at the same time that China is perceived as a potential military foe is beyond our comprehension. The same thing is true for India, not because of geopolitics but because of the wide spread corruption in its generic drug manufacturing.
I think that it is important that we disengage our economy from China, especially for products of strategic or critical importance. One of the problems with the Green Initiative is that China has cornered the market for solar panels, batteries, etc. Their dominance comes not just from wage arbitrage but also from the theft of intellectual property and other unfair or illegal trade practices.
I don’t care where plastic toys are manufactured. I do care where wellheads, drill pipe, MRI machines, medicines, and military equipment are manufactured. I also care from where my food comes.
This is such a bad idea, and I would really like to see the criteria for how they determine if a price hike is “fair” or not. Are they going to cap marginal profits on certain items?
Groceries already have low-single-digit profit margins. Best case scenario is Harris is just throwing red meat to the base and has no intention of actually pushing through this bullshit, but the problem with throwing red meat to the base is that they grow a taste for it, and want more.
At this point I view it as the sort of campaign rhetoric that Biden initiated for the 2022 mid-terms when he claimed he'd forgive student debt, apparently across the board. I believe that he and his advisors had a good idea that it would not be possible, but he could take credit for the gesture.
So it'll be like restructuring the Supreme Court and doing away with the inheritance step-up: not very likely, but sounds good to the traditional Democratic party constituency.
Later, when it doesn't happen, they can claim that they were prevented from taking this action by their political foes.
Fun fact, as you might well know, Nixon not only knew the whole time price controls were a bad idea, but explicitly called out the practice a month before implementing them in '71. It was purely a political move to secure re-election, and a completely unnecessary one at that, given that he crushed McGovern so badly in the '72 election he could've named Bebe Rebozo the new First Lady and still come out ahead:
I only go to Harris-Teeter when I have a $5 off from $30+ coupon or when they have fresh sweet corn. They may be owned by Kroger now, but why risk giving her profits?
It's not just Kamalaism though is it? "It is not that any economically literate thinker on the Right side of the political aisle is questioning Adam Smith’s fundamental truth that the wealth of Western nations could not have happened without free-market competition as its driving force. But certain aspects of the global economy in the early 21st century have led some to question whether a tipping point has now been reached where downsides are starting to outweigh upsides. I myself am one of many old-school conservatives who have had to rethink some long held assumptions about the economic facts of life. The biggest shocker, for me, has been the emergence of Woke Capitalism - something I never saw coming...." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/globalism-vs-national-conservatism
At this point I'm viewing "woke capitalism"--admittedly without firm support--as a sort of protective PR move by the ultra-wealthy tech moguls to by themselves the good will of the masses when compared to people like the old Koch brothers.
I think that this impetus is also coincidentally aligned with the way the tech job market was in the early aughts. I was a part of this and what I saw was a HUGE need for talented SW engineers, and that these self-same SEs had graduated after the major universities had gone at least partly woke, this being peer conditioned to adopt woke norms. So to make themselves, the tech lords, as the figurehead of their companies, appear to be like-thinking and righteous so as to court the affection of these desperately needed workers, they projected a very woke surface. This manifested itself concretely as onsite gyms, play areas, lounging areas, etc., sort of like a hip and permissive uncle might treat a favored niece/nephew.
But as near as I can tell, the actual business practices were just as cut-throat as they ever had been in the US.
So I see woke capitalism as practiced by big tech companies as a form of PR. Now, woke investment portfolios is another thing, although it, too, is simply a market response to a demand for a way of touting ones's social responsibility.
I personally think it's a mistake to see the madness of our times as some kind of top-down imposition. I see it more as organic to late stage Liberalism. A Liberalism that has reached its doom spiral I fear. A pessimistic view I know.
To be clear, I don't see tech moguls as *leading* woke capitalism so much as responding to whatever public sentiments that they think will make them, and their companies/products, more appealing to current public sentiments.
So far as top-down vs bottom up, when talking about zeitgeist, I'm never been able to get comfortable one way or another and now think that it's a circular phased social phenomenon, where perhaps at one stage a very persuasive public figure--a rare, intermittent leader, for better or worse, maybe--who injects new ideas that take hold and grow into popular lasting public sentiments that succeeding leadership figures mimic so as to leverage political power.
Maybe this is a poor example, but it's the first one I can think of now. Joseph McCarthy perceived the public discomfort with a powerful Soviet Union, and morphed it into a hunt for crypto-communists for personal advancement. Nixon followed on. to a degree mimicking McCarthy because he could that see it was playing well to the public.
So it seems like a punctuated circular cycle--or maybe a spiral would be better, since in includes the idea of the addition of new dimensions as time progresses.
After Nixon's presidency, Milton Friedman said that the wage and price freeze was worse than anything Nixon had been accused of doing in the Watergate scandal.
>Sure, it was kind of stupid, but it reassured voters that the President was Doing Something.
Indeed, and this is all that will matter to leftist Kangala voters. That she is "doing something." Later she will promise free money in various ways, and it won't matter how much we say that it is too costly or is counter-productive. The voters just want her to be "on their side," regardless of whether the current idea works or not.
It's like African countries where you simply promise your coalition of tribes money from the government trough, at the expense of opposing tribes.
A good right-win candidate could oppose this however, by looking more responsible, someone you can trust. Unfortunately Trump has always tweeted like a child, and keeps referring to himself in third person, with random ALL CAPS in His Posts, and three exclamation points like in grade school.
I always said the best candidate for the GOP was Biden, and the best candidate for the Left was Trump. Now Biden is gone. Whether it was Harris or someone else, it was inevitable that the Democrat candidate would beat Trump, who should never have run again to "get revenge" and satisfy his ego. So arguments against Harris' ideas won't matter in this race. And the Left just needs someone to sit there and approve what the Democrat leaders in Congress come up with, anyway.
That's been proven time and again. It's scary, and I'm surprised Harris hasn't announced a bump in the minimum wage to $40/hour! It would guarantee her election, as a majority of our population is economically illiterate.
In my opinion, I think it's a major error to assume that successful political leaders are as dumb as they portray in their rhetoric. I think that they are possessed of certain publicly attractive traits and are canny enough to realize this at a deep level, and they successfully and skillfully leverage all of them to their own advantage.
This (W&P fixing) always has the same effect: when vendors can't pass their increased costs on to consumers by price increases they don't go deeper in the hole by buying products that they will lose money on. The bare store shelves of Covid-19 will be back but it will not be "supply chain issues" that causes them to be bare. The ONLY way to keep food on the shelves is to reduce demand (by raising prices) or increasing the supply. The only thing that has increased in supply is the number of dollars in circulation which inflates the price of everything.
I remember that time; I was 22 then. I was a doctrinaire free-market libertarian--still am--and Nixon's announcement so infuriated me that I had to take a tranquilizer to keep from throwing a brick through my TV screen.
I was somewhat younger, an archeology student & a left-liberal (by the '70s standards!). Even though I didn't take an econ course until '76, I had a libertarian friend (we've now been married 40+ years) who explained why the W&P controls were a bad idea. Then he was proven correct as queueing happened for scarce goods (remember gas lines?).
Oh yeah, I remember those all too well. If I recall correctly, when they hit, price controls had been lifted on pretty much everything EXCEPT gasoline.
It can’t be that POTATUS’s actions on his first day in to fetter the gas and oil industry caused prices of everything that is transported from manufacturing to markets (that’s everything) to spike.
It *has got* to be a conspiracy by Big Egg to make the POTATUS administration look bad.
It's my understanding/recollection that Nixon's wage & price freeze was *voluntary*. There is no executive power that grants the president the legal ability to do this (short of war-time measures), and even Nixon understood this. I suppose it's a sign of the times that no "journalist" asked Harris why she thinks the president has the power to restrict wages and prices. Perhaps the media would be awakened from their torpor had Harris announced a wage freeze on journalists and media companies!
[And this is ignoring the economic aspects; e.g., how is "price gouging" legally defined?]
That Costco’s hot dogs and pizza have risen in price so little (if any) in the last four years is probably because they are used as loss leaders. Mrs. FPD and I used to enjoy a slice or dog/sausage almost every time we shopped there. It constituted a cheap date the two years (2003-04) we had three kids in college. With the exception of eating at the outdoor food court in Kauai after loading up with a week’s worth of provisions, we’ve not eaten at a Costco since 1999.
Secondly, I strongly suspect that with the exception of a few spices and olive oil that all of the ingredients of Costco pizza and dogs (flour, pork, etc.) are domestically produced.
Thirdly, we no longer use the Costco pharmacy. We use a pharmacy that sells more of our prescriptions that are domestically produced. Why Americans would put Chinese products into their bodies at the same time that China is perceived as a potential military foe is beyond our comprehension. The same thing is true for India, not because of geopolitics but because of the wide spread corruption in its generic drug manufacturing.
I think that it is important that we disengage our economy from China, especially for products of strategic or critical importance. One of the problems with the Green Initiative is that China has cornered the market for solar panels, batteries, etc. Their dominance comes not just from wage arbitrage but also from the theft of intellectual property and other unfair or illegal trade practices.
I don’t care where plastic toys are manufactured. I do care where wellheads, drill pipe, MRI machines, medicines, and military equipment are manufactured. I also care from where my food comes.
This is such a bad idea, and I would really like to see the criteria for how they determine if a price hike is “fair” or not. Are they going to cap marginal profits on certain items?
Groceries already have low-single-digit profit margins. Best case scenario is Harris is just throwing red meat to the base and has no intention of actually pushing through this bullshit, but the problem with throwing red meat to the base is that they grow a taste for it, and want more.
> "Harris is just throwing red meat to the base"
Given Harris's "base", wouldn't the proper metaphor be more like "throwing ripe soy"?
> "I would really like to see the criteria for how they determine if a price hike is 'fair' or not."
Never mind if it is "fair". How is it legal?
At this point I view it as the sort of campaign rhetoric that Biden initiated for the 2022 mid-terms when he claimed he'd forgive student debt, apparently across the board. I believe that he and his advisors had a good idea that it would not be possible, but he could take credit for the gesture.
So it'll be like restructuring the Supreme Court and doing away with the inheritance step-up: not very likely, but sounds good to the traditional Democratic party constituency.
Later, when it doesn't happen, they can claim that they were prevented from taking this action by their political foes.
Well, farm prices are mostly falling; so prices at the grocery store will be flat to slightly less in a few months.
Fun fact, as you might well know, Nixon not only knew the whole time price controls were a bad idea, but explicitly called out the practice a month before implementing them in '71. It was purely a political move to secure re-election, and a completely unnecessary one at that, given that he crushed McGovern so badly in the '72 election he could've named Bebe Rebozo the new First Lady and still come out ahead:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/nixons_wage_and.html
"Given that [Nixon] crushed McGovern so badly in the '72 election he could've named Bebe Rebozo the new First Lady and still come out ahead"
OK, that's funny!
Bebe was a great man, not sure about as First Lady.
I see your point, Mr. President. Perhaps Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations would be a better fit.
A blast from the past!
Bebe Rebozo. Now there's a name you can trust, huh?
I only go to Harris-Teeter when I have a $5 off from $30+ coupon or when they have fresh sweet corn. They may be owned by Kroger now, but why risk giving her profits?
> Since pay hikes were illegal that fall, all NR employees received promotions to more pompous-sounding positions **make** their raises legally valid
Should that be "making" or perhaps "to make"?
Thanks.
I'll fix it.
It's not just Kamalaism though is it? "It is not that any economically literate thinker on the Right side of the political aisle is questioning Adam Smith’s fundamental truth that the wealth of Western nations could not have happened without free-market competition as its driving force. But certain aspects of the global economy in the early 21st century have led some to question whether a tipping point has now been reached where downsides are starting to outweigh upsides. I myself am one of many old-school conservatives who have had to rethink some long held assumptions about the economic facts of life. The biggest shocker, for me, has been the emergence of Woke Capitalism - something I never saw coming...." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/globalism-vs-national-conservatism
At this point I'm viewing "woke capitalism"--admittedly without firm support--as a sort of protective PR move by the ultra-wealthy tech moguls to by themselves the good will of the masses when compared to people like the old Koch brothers.
I think that this impetus is also coincidentally aligned with the way the tech job market was in the early aughts. I was a part of this and what I saw was a HUGE need for talented SW engineers, and that these self-same SEs had graduated after the major universities had gone at least partly woke, this being peer conditioned to adopt woke norms. So to make themselves, the tech lords, as the figurehead of their companies, appear to be like-thinking and righteous so as to court the affection of these desperately needed workers, they projected a very woke surface. This manifested itself concretely as onsite gyms, play areas, lounging areas, etc., sort of like a hip and permissive uncle might treat a favored niece/nephew.
But as near as I can tell, the actual business practices were just as cut-throat as they ever had been in the US.
So I see woke capitalism as practiced by big tech companies as a form of PR. Now, woke investment portfolios is another thing, although it, too, is simply a market response to a demand for a way of touting ones's social responsibility.
But I could be wrong about all this...
I personally think it's a mistake to see the madness of our times as some kind of top-down imposition. I see it more as organic to late stage Liberalism. A Liberalism that has reached its doom spiral I fear. A pessimistic view I know.
To be clear, I don't see tech moguls as *leading* woke capitalism so much as responding to whatever public sentiments that they think will make them, and their companies/products, more appealing to current public sentiments.
So far as top-down vs bottom up, when talking about zeitgeist, I'm never been able to get comfortable one way or another and now think that it's a circular phased social phenomenon, where perhaps at one stage a very persuasive public figure--a rare, intermittent leader, for better or worse, maybe--who injects new ideas that take hold and grow into popular lasting public sentiments that succeeding leadership figures mimic so as to leverage political power.
Maybe this is a poor example, but it's the first one I can think of now. Joseph McCarthy perceived the public discomfort with a powerful Soviet Union, and morphed it into a hunt for crypto-communists for personal advancement. Nixon followed on. to a degree mimicking McCarthy because he could that see it was playing well to the public.
So it seems like a punctuated circular cycle--or maybe a spiral would be better, since in includes the idea of the addition of new dimensions as time progresses.
Yes agree with all that.
I predicted what would happen thirty years ago: https://shorturl.at/urvJX
Well done....why didn't you stop it then? (only kidding)
After Nixon's presidency, Milton Friedman said that the wage and price freeze was worse than anything Nixon had been accused of doing in the Watergate scandal.
I remember those freezes, and if I recall they were followed by the WIN! ("whip inflation now!") buttons during Ford's term.
I think...
>Sure, it was kind of stupid, but it reassured voters that the President was Doing Something.
Indeed, and this is all that will matter to leftist Kangala voters. That she is "doing something." Later she will promise free money in various ways, and it won't matter how much we say that it is too costly or is counter-productive. The voters just want her to be "on their side," regardless of whether the current idea works or not.
It's like African countries where you simply promise your coalition of tribes money from the government trough, at the expense of opposing tribes.
A good right-win candidate could oppose this however, by looking more responsible, someone you can trust. Unfortunately Trump has always tweeted like a child, and keeps referring to himself in third person, with random ALL CAPS in His Posts, and three exclamation points like in grade school.
I always said the best candidate for the GOP was Biden, and the best candidate for the Left was Trump. Now Biden is gone. Whether it was Harris or someone else, it was inevitable that the Democrat candidate would beat Trump, who should never have run again to "get revenge" and satisfy his ego. So arguments against Harris' ideas won't matter in this race. And the Left just needs someone to sit there and approve what the Democrat leaders in Congress come up with, anyway.
I have to believe that the average Democratic voter is economically illiterate too.
That's been proven time and again. It's scary, and I'm surprised Harris hasn't announced a bump in the minimum wage to $40/hour! It would guarantee her election, as a majority of our population is economically illiterate.
This simply underscores the notion that she is not very bright. Even Economics 101 is beyond her comprehension.
No. I think she's bright enough, all right.
In my opinion, I think it's a major error to assume that successful political leaders are as dumb as they portray in their rhetoric. I think that they are possessed of certain publicly attractive traits and are canny enough to realize this at a deep level, and they successfully and skillfully leverage all of them to their own advantage.
Never underestimate one's opponent.
This (W&P fixing) always has the same effect: when vendors can't pass their increased costs on to consumers by price increases they don't go deeper in the hole by buying products that they will lose money on. The bare store shelves of Covid-19 will be back but it will not be "supply chain issues" that causes them to be bare. The ONLY way to keep food on the shelves is to reduce demand (by raising prices) or increasing the supply. The only thing that has increased in supply is the number of dollars in circulation which inflates the price of everything.
I remember that time; I was 22 then. I was a doctrinaire free-market libertarian--still am--and Nixon's announcement so infuriated me that I had to take a tranquilizer to keep from throwing a brick through my TV screen.
I was somewhat younger, an archeology student & a left-liberal (by the '70s standards!). Even though I didn't take an econ course until '76, I had a libertarian friend (we've now been married 40+ years) who explained why the W&P controls were a bad idea. Then he was proven correct as queueing happened for scarce goods (remember gas lines?).
Oh yeah, I remember those all too well. If I recall correctly, when they hit, price controls had been lifted on pretty much everything EXCEPT gasoline.
lagging indicators!
At least Nixon included a wage freeze (however ineffective) - Kamala wants to freeze prices while increasing the minimum wage.
Yes. It would work like rent control, apparently.
It can’t be that POTATUS’s actions on his first day in to fetter the gas and oil industry caused prices of everything that is transported from manufacturing to markets (that’s everything) to spike.
It *has got* to be a conspiracy by Big Egg to make the POTATUS administration look bad.
It's my understanding/recollection that Nixon's wage & price freeze was *voluntary*. There is no executive power that grants the president the legal ability to do this (short of war-time measures), and even Nixon understood this. I suppose it's a sign of the times that no "journalist" asked Harris why she thinks the president has the power to restrict wages and prices. Perhaps the media would be awakened from their torpor had Harris announced a wage freeze on journalists and media companies!
[And this is ignoring the economic aspects; e.g., how is "price gouging" legally defined?]