In early 2024, the Biden administration pulled out all the stops in a bizarre attempt to shift the blame for inflation onto private sector businesses.
"Sports drinks bottles are smaller. A bag of chips has fewer chips, but they're still charging you just as much," then-President Joe Biden complained in a video released just before that year's Super Bowl. A few weeks later, Biden raged against what he called "shrinkflation" during his State of the Union address, and he asked lawmakers to pass a bill authorizing the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on businesses that change prices or the size of packages. (The bill never passed.)
It was all a bit ridiculous. As I wrote at the time, shrinkflation is neither a novel idea nor a sinister one. It's just a natural market response to worsening inflation—you know, the actual problem that Biden was desperate to blame on anything besides his administration's own "run it hot" economic policies.
