From February 2020 to this July, grocery prices grew nearly 26%, outpacing overall inflation.
Inflation is one of the key issues concerning voters this year,
and it's been a pain point that Kamala Harris has been working to address and
that Donald Trump has been seeking to weigh her down with.
Searching for a politically expedient explanation for why inflation happened is a difficult problem.
People don't want to hear that supply chains were snagged.
And the only other go to explanation
that there was too much demand would make President Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus package that Congress passed seem too generous
in retrospect.
Which helps explain why another idea has taken center stage.
When asked at her CNN town hall last week about the cost of groceries,
this is what Harris had to the first time that we will have a national ban on price gouging,
which is companies taking advantage of the desperation and need of the American consumer
and jacking up prices without any consequence or accountability.
But how good of an answer is this to a voter worried about inflation?
Can we really blame price gouging
or corporate greed for the pain felt by consumers over the past four years?
The idea that corporate greed is responsible for inflation is sometimes called greedflation,
a catchy and simple portmanteau that helped root the idea in the minds of consumers.
But like many careful and interesting economic arguments,