Earlier this week, President Joe Biden addressed rising meat prices in the country. With beef prices 20% higher today than they were a year ago, Biden absolved his administration of any responsibility. Instead, he blamed the meat industry. And, to combat the rising costs, Biden proposed more red tape and tighter regulations for meat companies — which will, of course, increase prices further.
He then took the extra step of blaming a lack of competition among the country’s four leading meatpacking corporations as the reason for the price increases.
“Four big corporations control more than half the markets in beef, pork, and poultry,” Biden said on Monday. “These middlemen that they buy from, farmers and ranchers, and sell the processed product to grocery stores, that’s the way it works.”
This follows a pattern in the Biden administration. When a crisis occurs, the standard procedure is to blame other people and call for more government regulation.
Consider Biden’s previous response to the rise of gas prices. When discussing the reasons behind a seven-year record high for unleaded, the Biden administration blamed oil and gas producers.
In addition to more red tape, the Biden administration seeks to pour $1 billion in loans, grants, and other training initiatives to smaller meatpacking companies to incentivize more competition in the industry.
“Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation,” Biden said in a virtual meeting Monday with farmers and ranchers. “That’s what we’re seeing in poultry and those industries now. Small independent farmers and ranchers are being driven out of business.”
The meat industry rejects this rationale. According to the Wall Street Journal, industry claims prices are higher because of inflation in the costs of production — especially costs associated with animal feed, packaging, and transport. This has resulted in a recent surge in prices.
According to the Labor Department’s consumer-price index, bacon and ground beef have exploded to a 26% and 17% increase, respectively, compared to a year ago.
Furthermore, Biden’s explanation for the hefty prices suffers from questionable logic. Inflation is at a 40-year high, and Biden fails to acknowledge it as a problem. How could it not affect meat prices?
As for blaming the four major meat companies, their market share has been roughly the same for three decades, yet it was somehow never a problem before the Biden administration needed a scapegoat. Nobody complained about it during the Trump administration or the Obama administration — or even the Bush administration, for that matter. Is Biden suggesting a conspiracy theory that the four companies are colluding to hurt Americans — but only during Biden’s presidency?
Unless you’re gullible enough to believe that, the (possible) lack of competition does not seem to be the problem.
Biden’s explanation did have its fair share of critics, least of which was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The organization ripped Biden’s plan to reduce meat prices as “fundamentally misguided.”
“One has to ask, if, as the administration asserts, consolidation in meat and other industries has been a problem for years and it is also driving the current surge in prices, then why didn’t it drive prices higher before?” the chamber asked. “It is pretty clear that the administration is attempting to use higher prices to justify their preexisting agenda to overturn decades of bipartisan consensus around antitrust and competition policy.”
So Biden is trying to find a scapegoat and exploit a crisis at the same time. That’s some real leadership for you.
