EXCERPT:
WARREN: “I understand if you want to do a lecture about this, but let’s just start with, where have you been for the last 30 years, as three dozen states have price gouging laws and they have used them effectively? States like Texas and Florida, they’ve used price gouging laws. Price gouging laws are not price control. Price gouging laws are to say, you know, sometimes markets go off the rails. And when they do, we need some ways to get them back on the rails. We need some curbs on that behavior. So, for example, we watched in the pandemic how prices went up for a whole lot of reasons. They went up partly because we had supply chain kinks, we had problems because of the war in Ukraine that cut supplies of certain commodities, and one of the things that happened as a result of that is there were corporations that said, ‘Whoa! Now that we have inflation, now that prices are up overall, this is a great opportunity for us to raise prices not just in passing along costs, but to go way, way, way above that. And how do we know that it was way, way above just passing along costs?”