Watchdog Echoes Concerns of Former Treasury Secretary on Antitrust and Inflation

For Immediate Release                                                                           Contact: Abigail Graham: (202) 417-7235

May 23, 2022                                                                                                           

Washington, D.C. – The  Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) shared the concerns of former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers about recent antitrust efforts in both Congress and the Biden administration contributing to the ongoing inflation crisis. Summers took to Twitter recently to explain that “populist antitrust policy will make the US economy more inflationary and less resilient.”

TPA Executive Director, Patrick Hedger, offered the following comments:

“From Pew Research to polling conducted by TPA, multiple polls show Americans’ top concern by far is inflation, not antitrust. Yet officials in Washington continue to dedicate significant time and effort to targeting America’s tech sector with multiple antitrust proposals, an issue that does not even register with voters.

“Not only is Washington wasting the people’s time on antitrust efforts, Americans couldn’t care less about antitrust.  And, as former Secretary Summers has noted, these antitrust actions would actually make inflation worse. Targeting free services, low-cost generic products, and other conveniences made possible by the size and scale of companies in America’s world-leading tech sector will undoubtedly exacerbate the pocketbook problems facing Americans.

“Populists on both sides of the aisle have declared war on the economics that make life more affordable and more convenient, and they have no intention on stopping at the borders of Silicon Valley. There’s never a good time to mire the economy in subjective, ever-changing regulatory standards, but it’s hard to think of a worse time than now.”

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Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to educating the public through the research, analysis and dissemination of information on the government’s effects on the economy.