Groundwork Collaborative Is Terrified Of EndingPolitics.com

The resident geniuses over at Groundwork Collaborative are absolutely terrified to be interviewed by us here at Ending Politics about their inflation "study."

We've debunked pretty much every inflation myth we've come across on this website over the past few years. Type "inflation" into our website's search bar, and you'll be treated to a litany of article about inflation, the real cause of it, and the modern idiotic (and factually incorrect) takes on the subject.

It's become quite boring for us though, because it seems we're just debunking the same nonsense over and over again.

But a few weeks ago, we stumbled upon a new piece of idiocy, a "study" that a left-wing think tank called Groundwork Collaborative pieced together out of some irrelevant data they probably found on the Bureau of Economic Analysis' website.

As you might expect, this study proves in no way, shape, or form that "corporate profits" are driving inflation, but they resident geniuses over at Groundwork Collaborative decided to publish this propaganda piece on their website anyway. This six-page piece of garbage rambles about the PPI decreasing over the course of 6 months in 2023 (before a sharp increase in the latter half of 2023, long after the pandemic had ended and supply chains had completely returned to normal, but just ignore that part!), how Proctor & Gamble saw, GASP!, a large $800 million dollar windfall in profits (P&G's quarterly revenue is normally around $20B which nets the company around $3.5B, normally only about a 17.5% profit margin), and the diaper market.

Interestingly, in the conclusion of the report, Groundwork Collaborative never explicitly states whether or not they believe corporations raising their prices on consumers is what's actually driving inflation. It is one of the shortest, most vague conclusions we've ever read in almost any garbage think-tank funded political study and nowhere in the short, four-paragraph conclusion does Groundwork Collaborative seem to come to any... well... conclusion. We should mention that they actually do admit business costs have gone up over the past few years (gee... I wonder why), and then they go on to whine that even though business costs have "stabilized" or "in many cases, come down significantly" (they fail to give an estimate on how many is "in many cases" and fail to numerically define "significantly") that businesses haven't yet "stop[ped] gouging consumers." Price gouging is of course illegal in many states, and it seems to us that if Groundwork Collaborative is so convinced they can prove such a thing is actually happening, they should gather some evidence, take said companies to court (we're not even sure which companies they're actually accusing of "gouging" here), and prove to a judge or jury that their allegations of price gouging are true. Instead, they're using their operating revenue (wherever the hell that's coming from) to complain about it on the internet.

So because this entire study seemed absolutely ridiculous to us, and in no way proved that our current bout of inflation is being caused by "corporate profiteering," we reached out to Groundwork Collaborative to set up an interview with them. We really wanted them to elaborate on a lot of the points they made in their study, as well as more thoroughly explain to us what the conclusion of their study actually means. We reached out in every way we could think of, including emailing their press department directly. We emailed them a couple times before Easter weekend, then the following Monday, when we finally got a response from someone named Ashley Woolheater, who we found out later doesn't actually work for Groundwork Collaborative, but apparently has certain communication tasks outsourced to her. She informed us that... Groundwork Collaborative actually takes the week off after Easter for a proverbial "spring break," and that we'd be hearing back from them after their vacation. One week later, we still hadn't heard back from any of their actual employees, so about midway through the work week, we reached out one final time. Finally, we received a response from their communications manager, a man named Finn Storer (whose pronouns are "he/him," for those of you that might give a fuck), who apologized for the delayed response, and informed us, quote: "Unfortunately, we'll be unable to set up an interview."

It's noteworthy that "Doctor" Lindsay Owens, who is the executive director of Groundwork Collaborative and penned this idiotic non-study of how corporations are secretly engaging in a global conspiracy to rip off the American people along with her colleague Elizabeth Pancotti (another D.C. elitist who probably loves the Federal Reserve when it suits her political positions but hates it when it proves her positions are idiotic), went to and graduated from Stanford fucking University. This Stanford University post-graduate Ph.D is too afraid to sit down for an interview over Skype with us airhead bloggers at EndingPolitics.com. God forbid her precious "study" is scrutinized in the slightest possible way by someone who's far less educated than she is.

We'd like to note that the questions we would've asked Dr. Owens are fairly basic, elementary ones that anyone with a fully functional brain probably would've pondered after reading the aforementioned study:

-How do corporate profits actually have an effect on the CPI?

-Is your claim that these "profits" are strictly from marking up prices on their goods far beyond input costs?

-How much of these "profits" are come from cost-cutting, as opposed to price-raising?

-How much of these "record profits" are just from making more sales?

-Are these "profits" you speak of adjusted for inflation? If not, after one would adjust them for inflation, are the even actually record-breaking?

-How do you actually determine if the profit margin on a company's product is too high? Where do you get this infinite wisdom?

...and so on.

We're on a mission here to get to the bottom of this. Maybe we're wrong here. Maybe the laws of economics have truly ceased to exist, that expanding the money supply really hasn't caused the current bout of inflation, and that all this inflation is coming from a global corporate conspiracy to rip off the American people, because the big corporate meanies have figured out that the American people are all stupid because they believe inflation is caused by an expanded money supply that chases the same amount of goods and services. Maybe that's true. But we really aren't able to verify this through any "study" that's been published by a left-leaning think tank over the past couple years because these studies don't actually prove what their publishing think tanks say they do. We're going to reach out to more of these think tanks in the coming weeks to set up interviews with them. Maybe some of them will be less afraid of us than the resident geniuses over at Groundwork Collaborative (fat chance). We'll be ready to publish updates to our blog when one of these left-leaning think tanks offer us some sort of convincing evidence of their claims. In the meantime, our offer for a sit-down with the fellows at Groundwork Collaborative stands.