Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania leaned into the podium, almost past the microphone, to make his point to the union crowd about how mad corporate leaders are at him.
“But I got news for them,” Casey told Dauphin County Democrats and AFSCME members. “They should get used to it. Because I’m going to continue to prosecute the case on greedflation and shrinkflation.”
For Democrats trying to defend the White House and Senate majority, Casey is emerging as the tip of the spear in attacking “greedflation” — a blunt term for corporations that jack up prices and rip off shoppers to maximize profits — and trying to reframe the election-year narrative about the economy.
Fast-rising prices over the past four years have opened a key soft spot in 2024 for Democrats on an important voter concern, with polls showing that inflation is weighing down President Joe Biden in his bid for a second term against Donald Trump.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Casey is trying to help Biden by making the case against greedflation in the critical presidential swing state he represents, where a victory for Democrats is crucial to keeping the White House and Senate.
No Democrat has won the White House without Pennsylvania’s support since Harry S. Truman in 1948, and a Casey loss would likely guarantee Republican control of a Senate currently divided by the narrowest of margins.
Casey, running for a fourth term, argues that consumer prices are high primarily because of greedflation, a term coined to target corporate profiteering at shoppers’ expense under the cover of inflation. Casey also is attacking greedflation’s cousin, “shrinkflation”: a seemingly covert way for companies to raise prices by slightly reducing product size, like shortening candy bars or putting fewer potato chips in the bag.
For Casey, the argument lines up neatly with the populist politics that have made him a favorite of labor unions, and he has taken on the job with gusto, seemingly spending more time attacking greedflation than his actual opponent in November, Republican David McCormick.
Inflation hit a four-decade high of 9.1% in 2022, more than enough to get the attention of consumers. And blaming greedflation for high prices is perhaps a potent argument both to direct the anger of the squeezed wage earner and deflect Republican accusations that spending under Biden — including his $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package — caused higher prices.
McCormick, a former hedge fund CEO, calls Casey’s contentions “nonsense” and blamed federal spending under Biden and rising energy prices.
“This greedflation-shrinkflation thing is trying to distract the conversation about what really happened,” McCormick said in an interview.
Economists generally don’t subscribe to either side’s black-and-white explanation.
Instead, they tend to list many forces that played a role in global inflation during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, including pandemic-fueled supply-chain shortages worldwide, a strong labor market pushing up wages and Russia’s attack on Ukraine creating energy and food bottlenecks.
Prices in the U.S. remain about 20%, on average, above where they were before the pandemic.
But the U.S. government’s largely successful efforts to rein in inflation without nudging the economy into recession haven’t convinced people that credit is due, especially as rising food and housing prices defy overall slowing inflation rates.
The issue of the economy is No. 1 for many voters, and polls show the impact of inflation is weighing on how voters feel about Biden, despite improving views of the economy, said Christopher Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion in Allentown.
Borick said he has seen evidence that voters will buy the argument that companies jacked up prices to take advantage of inflation. But, even if they do, voters won’t necessarily give a pass to Biden and…
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