Daniel Bice
Sen. Tammy Baldwin has been an outspoken voice in favor of cracking down on corporate price gouging and consumer product shrinkflation.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, may even have borrowed some of those ideas.
Yet despite these efforts, Baldwin, a second-term Democrat, has collected $33,500 in campaign cash from major food and consumer product companies over the years, including $12,000 this year. She is running for re-election against Republican candidate Eric Hovde.
Indeed, since announcing her latest plan in February to hold down costs on consumer goods, Baldwin has accepted $4,000 from General Mills' political action committee and $1,000 from Hershey's PAC.
General Mills came under criticism last year from U.S. Sen. Bob Casey for hiking its prices five times in 2021 and 2022. The Hershey Co. reduced the size of such products as Dot's Pretzels and Hershey's Kisses in the past.
Zach Bannon, a spokesman for Hovde, accused Baldwin of duplicity for, in effect, saying one thing about price gouging in the Senate and doing another with her campaign fund.
“Sen. Baldwin’s lack of understanding of the economy is only outmatched by her hypocrisy," Bannon said. "After living in D.C. for 26 years, and now spending most of her time in New York City with her Wall Street partner, her commitment to the people of Wisconsin is secondary to her personal gain."
A spokesman for Baldwin pushed back on the criticism.
"Tammy Baldwin will stand up to anyone on behalf of Wisconsin families," said Andrew Mamo, spokesman for Baldwin's campaign. "She is proud to fight corporate price gouging so everyone in Wisconsin can afford to live a good life in our great state."
Baldwin began raising concerns about price gouging in 2022 when she joined other Democrats in sponsoring federal legislation to authorize the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to enforce a federal ban against excessive price increases.
The Democrats accused large corporations of using the pandemic to boost prices and collect record profits.
The measure did not pass.
Records show Baldwin has received $19,000 from food and snack companies since cosponsoring that legislation. That includes PACs run by Conagra Brands, the Snack Food Association, the Kraft-Heinz Co., Archer Daniels Midland, General Mills and Hershey's.
In February, Baldwin joined other Democrats in reintroducing the measure this term, saying large corporations were using inflation and supply-chain disruptions to justify raising the cost of consumer goods.
harris"Big corporations are price gouging Americans, taking in record profits, and giving their executives lavish bonuses, all while Wisconsin families struggle to get by," Baldwin said in a news release. "It’s wrong and we need to do more to hold these big corporations accountable and give Wisconsinites some breathing room."
The same month, Baldwin also backed a bill aimed at stopping shrinkflation, the practice of reducing the size of products without lowering the prices. The measure would direct the FTC to draft regulations declaring shrinkflation a deceptive act and give state and federal officials the power to take civil action against manufacturers who do this.
Interestingly, Baldwin criticized General Mills in a news release for trimming the “family size” of Cocoa Puffs cereal from 19.3 ounces to 18.1 ounces while charging the same price. Over the years, General Mills' PAC has donated $15,000 to Baldwin's campaign.
Baldwin officials said her legislation shows her Senate work is not influenced by campaign donations.
These proposals gained national attention when Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, announced she would authorize the first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries if elected.
Harris' plan came under immediate criticism. Her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, and other Republicans accused Harris of pushing "communist-style price controls." Her proposal has also alarmed food industry officials and even some left-of-center economists, who’ve warned such policies can hurt more than they help.
Among other things, critics have said, price gouging does not cause inflation and such a proposal could be harmful to supermarkets, which operate on narrow profit margins.
"This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality," Jason Furman, a top economist in the Democratic President Barack Obama's administration, told the New York Times. "There’s no upside here, and there is some downside."
But Baldwin has not backed down from her proposals.
In a recent piece in the Journal Sentinel, she said "greedflation" — the practice of raising prices on consumers while inflation is high to pad a corporation’s bottom line — continues to be a major problem.
From 2020 to 2022, Baldwin said, core inflation rose but corporate profits soared by 75%, five times faster than inflation. She said grocery store price hikes are largely due to corporate greed.
Baldwin wrote: "I’m proud to be helping lead the Price Gouging Prevention Act, which would ban this price gouging and put a cop on the beat to hold corporations accountable for their greedy profit-over-people practices."
Contact Daniel Bice at (414) 313-6684 or dbice@jrn.com. Follow him on X at @DanielBice or on Facebook at fb.me/daniel.bice.
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