During an interview with “Pod Save America” on Wednesday released on Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said that all the money that the spending in the American Rescue Plan put into the economy played a role in inflation.
Warren stated, “We got out there, just about a year ago right now, and passed what was called the American Rescue package. And you may remember, it was a lot of money, but it was money that went into vaccines and the — kind of the community health center way of getting distribution out, it was money that went into getting our schools open again and making sure they would have the resources to do that, and it was money that went into small businesses to keep those little businesses open and to keep jobs open, and it worked. People have jobs. And that 7 million figure, that’s not just an abstraction … And yes, putting that money in at the same time that you then turned around and hit shifts in demand because of the pandemic, supply chain kinks because of the pandemic, Putin both driving up the cost of oil and the cost of wheat and soy and other things that are produced in Ukraine, but the other one is watching the giant corporations, particularly where there’s a lot of concentration. These giant corporations said, everyone’s talking about price increases. This, they saw it, was their chance to pass along costs…but to take another dollop on the price scale and just boost their profits. So, we’ve got all these companies that are at record profits, and because of increased concentration, there’s no way to compete those prices back down. So, you’ve got these multiple threads running through here.”
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