Report: Record corporate profits are driving inflation, not labor costs

It’s not workers making a decent wage that are driving inflation, as some conservative politicians and pundits keep asserting. Rather, according to a new report by the Maine Center for Economic Policy, higher costs are the result of corporate consolidation and businesses using their control over the market to set inflated prices.

Those corporations are raking in record profits while Mainers are paying higher prices for everyday items like meat, milk, bread, fuel and electricity.

“The mismatch between Mainers feeling the pinch as corporate profits rise is the result of choices made by policymakers over time, particularly at the federal level, that have given corporations greater power over people to set prices and control the flow of goods and services,” reads the report authored by MECEP policy analysts James Myall and Arthur Phillips. “Now, corporations are using this power to extract even larger profits under the cover of current global supply chain disruptions.”

Myall and Phillips explain that the problem stems from three decades of relatively unrestricted corporate consolidation, where a small number of corporations control most of the market for a particular product.

https://mainebeacon.com/report-record-corporate-profits-are-driving-inflation-not-labor-costs/