How Sen. Bob Casey became Democrats’ go-to messenger on ‘greedflation’ — among the biggest issues for the party ahead of November

The blame game over consumer price inflation during President Joe Biden’s time in office is one of the defining debates of this year’s election.

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat whose reelection contest may determine control of the Senate in January, has played a major role in shaping his party’s messaging on the issue.

Republicans, including Casey’s opponent Dave McCormick, have put the blame for inflation on the multi-trillion-dollar spending initiatives that Biden championed to help the economy rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic.

» READ MORE: Potatoes, huggies, and toothpaste are rising in price and Bob Casey says greedy corporations are to blame

But Casey, who voted for Biden’s spending bills, has focused on a different culprit: big corporations that continue to rake in huge profits while raising prices on consumers. He calls it “greedflation,” and the concept has caught on with his party’s leaders, including Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Despite price increases having slowed dramatically this year, inflation and its causes are likely to continue to be a major issue in the Senate race, and Casey and McCormick will be able to hash it out in person next month. The candidates this week agreed to debate Oct. 3 in Harrisburg.

Here’s what you need to know about what exactly Casey is proposing and why it’s become such a big deal in this year’s Senate and presidential elections:

Casey in 2023 issued a series of reports on rising prices. His office found in part that while inflation rose 14% over a two-year period ending in July 2022, corporate profits grew over 74% during that time.

Since then, he has helped to champion legislation that would create a national ban on price-gouging and questioned companies like Walmart and Amazon about how they set prices. He has also criticized manufacturers for reducing the size of products or quantity of items in packages without reducing prices, known as “shrinkflation.”

The price-gouging legislation introduced by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and cosponsored by Casey and other Democrats would make it illegal “for a person to sell or offer for sale a good or service at a grossly excessive price, regardless of the person’s position in a supply chain or distribution network.”

The bill leaves it up to the Federal Trade Commission to decide what constitutes a grossly excessive price, and it recommends the agency set the mark at prices that are 120% of “the average price for such good or service in the market during the 6-month period preceding the sale.”

The bill does not call for the FTC to create a predetermined list for the prices of different consumer goods, as some of Casey’s critics have said. Instead, it allows the agency or state attorneys general to investigate companies accused of price-gouging.

Casey noted that 37 states, including Pennsylvania, already have laws against price-gouging and that ”capitalism is alive and well” in those places.

“My legislation would give the federal government the same powers to go after the big corporations that jack up prices on American families,” Casey said in a statement.

Democrats have struggled for much of Biden’s term to find their footing on how to discuss inflation. Casey’s focus on “greedflation” offered them a chance to go on offense by blaming corporations for inflation rather than play defense.

First, Biden referenced Casey’s “shrinkflation” plan during his State of the Union address in March. And now that Vice President Kamala Harris has taken over Biden’s spot on the Democratic ticket, she has embraced the bill banning price-gouging.

» READ MORE: In DNC speech, Sen. Bob Casey says corporations are ‘extorting families at the checkout counter’

Casey got a prime speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in August, and he used it to drive home the message.

“Prices are up because the corporations are scheming to drive them up,” Casey said. “Most companies are good companies. It’s the food conglomerates … They’re the ones who are extorting families at the checkout counter. This is greedflation.”

Democrats’ price-gouging platform has also generated criticism. Z. John Zhang, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who studies pricing, has described the strategy as “blameflation.”

“It’s more a political expediency than the actual diagnosis of what caused inflation,” Zhang said. “Politically, it’s always a good message to tell the consumers that the firms are just so greedy they make too much profit.”

Zhang said that companies were acting appropriately given the economic conditions during the pandemic, with heightened energy costs, significant supply shortages, and widespread consumer understanding that those disruptions could cause prices to rise.

“It’s not like a firm became more greedy than normal,” he said. “It’s just that they had more opportunities to raise prices.”

More aggressive laws against price-gouging, he said, would make companies reluctant to raise prices and would consequently reduce how much money companies make per product. That in turn would make them less motivated to produce more, worsening supply shortages, he said.

McCormick said Casey’s plan “imposes Venezuela-style, socialist price controls on groceries and other essentials” and that inflation should be blamed firstly on Democrats’ “unprecedented taxpayer-funded spending spree.”

“They ignored the warnings, even within their own party, that their spending plans would set off once-in-a-generation price increases,” he said in a speech on economic policy last week.

McCormick said he would instead boost energy production, make the U.S. more competitive in international trade, and “claw back inflationary spending on liberal pet projects and deliver another round of tax relief for the middle class.”

Like Casey, McCormick has also demonstrated a fondness for economic wordplay by launching Bobflation.com, a website which allows users to track price increases since 2019 on Pennsylvania goods.

The driving forces behind the recent period of high inflation are not as simple as either Casey or McCormick is making them out to be.

While White House economists found that corporate behavior played a role in recent price increases, few believe that having a national price-gouging ban in place before 2020 could have prevented significant inflation in the years that followed.

Conversely, many economists have said the unprecedented federal spending measures in the wake of the pandemic contributed to inflation — but they also point to significant macroeconomic factors.

Manufacturing and transportation network shutdowns at the time caused lasting supply shortages. The geopolitical turmoil following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove up gas prices. The pandemic also caused unexpected shifts in consumer behavior, such as increased spending on goods compared to services. And the Federal Reserve adopted “easy money” policies in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic’s arrival by restarting quantitative easing and slashing interest rates.

The GOP line of attack also ignores that two of the four major federal spending bills passed in response to the pandemic — the $2.2 trillion CARES Act and the $484 billion Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act — were signed into law by former President Donald Trump.

For Zhang, all of those factors combined to create a circumstance that was bound to produce inflation.

“If you want to blame anybody, you want to blame the environment [companies] were placed in,” he said. “In fact, firms were doing what they were supposed to do.”