On any given day, Groundwork's analyses, op-eds, reports, and commentary are featured in leading publications and on the most influential news programs and podcasts.
Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—And What That Means for Your Wallet Publishes September 29.
“Sometimes they’re collecting data that we don’t realize we’re giving away freely, like tracking our mouse movements, looking at what we hover over. And they’re amalgamating all that data and using it to basically create a sort of individualized demand curve for us to estimate with some level of precision exactly how much we’re willing to pay for an item.”
“These are the exact kind of spikes that are going to hit low-income people the hardest, at the exact same time that their incomes are slowing the most,” said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy for the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive group that focuses on cost-of-living issues. “I totally understand why people are really mad right now.”
“He’s returning to a dumpster fire,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal think tank focused on economic issues. “The president will not have the faith and confidence of the American people — the economy is their top issue and the president is saying, ‘You’re on your own.’”
"Powell kept the economy resilient throughout the pandemic and, in combination with robust fiscal policy through COVID-era stimulus legislation, supported workers when they needed it most," said Liz Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank.
Alex Jacquez: “What we’ve seen is that the last couple months in particular have not helped at all. We’ve seen the hottest inflation prints the last two months than we’ve seen since 2022, gas prices are sitting at $4.50, and on Tuesday we saw that real wages actually fell year-over-year for the first time since 2023.”
For example, some Instacart users shopping at an Ohio Target last year were charged $2.99 for a jar of Skippy Peanut Butter – while other shoppers on the app were charged $3.59, a Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative study found.
But the current moment could also be an opportunity for progressives to show they have ambitious legislative plans, said Alex Jacquez, policy chief at the progressive advocacy group Groundwork Collaborative and a former adviser to President Joe Biden and for Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.
“We have seen that many working-class people just no longer feel that the American Dream of being in the middle class is attainable to them,” said Elizabeth Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative. “For many, it is really just about the simple fact of having the security and stability of being able to afford the basics.”
Trump’s war in Iran has driven prices through the roof and today’s PPI reading shows there is no end in sight.