Frag No. 31: The Great American Gouge
Consumers are being ripped-off by corporate greed heads.
This installment of Background Briefing with Ian Masters is worth your attention.
The first segment is about the 80th anniversary of the D-Day operation, and how it marked a turn in the relationship between Great Britain and the US.
The second segment features Lindsay Owens, co-author of a piece in the American Prospect titled “The Age of Recoupment.” If you’re interested in why many Americans continue to believe that the economy is lousy, pay attention to the idea of algorithmic gouging, a new form of price collusion made possible by technology. Here’s a quote from the piece and a link to the article:
“Today, everywhere consumers turn, whether they are shopping for groceries at the local Kroger or for plane tickets online, they are being gouged. Landlords are quietly utilizing new software to band together and raise rents. Uber has been accused of raising the price of rides when a customer’s phone battery is drained. Ticketmaster layers on additional fees as you move through the process of securing seats to your favorite artist’s upcoming show. Amazon’s secret pricing algorithm, code-named “Project Nessie,” was designed to identify products where it could raise prices, on the expectation that competitors would follow suit.”
https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-03-age-of-recoupment/
The final segment is with scholar Jacob Hacker and it covers the 2017 corporate tax cuts from Trump’s first term. These cuts lowered the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, and the GOP is on record as wanting to make them permanent, which would be a boon to rich people and corporations and a disaster for the rest of us.