In Elizabeth Warren’s bizarre quest to blame corporate greed for inflation, she has tweeted that meatpacking companies are “using inflation as cover to raise prices.”
Inflation is defined as a general increase in prices. So, to be clear, Senator Warren is accusing meatpacking companies of using a general increase in prices as cover to increase prices.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that maybe meatpacking companies are just one of many industries that are raising prices, since (by definition) that’s how you get a general increase in prices. Inflation has broadened out, and we’re well past the early summer, when prices in specific markets such as used cars were bringing up the average. And the producer price index is up 9.6 percent in the past year, nearly three percentage points more than the consumer price index. It would be a truly strange move by the greedy corporations to raise their own input prices, too, in a callous bid for more profits.
Now, if every industry is using every other industries’ raising prices as cover to raise prices, then the present inflation is the greatest conspiracy in world history, and Senator Warren should provide us some evidence of it so we can get to the bottom of it.