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ALTON - Les Rubin, founder and CEO of Main Street Economics, appeared on Our Daily Show! on Riverbender.com to debunk some recently raised economic myths while exploring the root causes of inflation and more.
While Rubin said much of Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s economic policies remain vague, he did note her focus on lowering housing and grocery costs, but denied her claims of “price gouging” by grocery stores.
“I’m not sure what she means by that because there’s really no evidence that the Fed[eral Reserve] has found that that’s happening,” Rubin said of price gouging. “If she’s talking about fixing prices, of course, that’s debunked by virtually everybody from all sides. That has never worked and will never work, all it does is create shortages and black markets - it doesn’t solve the problem.”
Rubin sees Harris’s current platform as full of “populist ideas” which, while popular with voters, contribute to the nation’s increasingly high deficit. Rather than corporate greed or collusion, he sees the federal government’s poor economic policies as the cause behind the post-pandemic rise of inflation.
“What’s led to the problem, it’s not collusion in the marketplace, it’s the fiscal irresponsibility of our federal government and bad fiscal policies,” he explained. “We've had this explosion of the money supply, and when you increase the money supply much more rapidly than you increase the supply of goods and services, then you get one thing: you get inflation.”
One step the Fed takes to try curbing inflation is by raising interest rates in an attempt to slow down the demand for those limited goods and services. However, Rubin noted that most Americans will still feel the effects of inflation until their “real earnings,” or wages after accounting for inflation, have gone up. These and other economic factors have made home buying a challenge in 2024.
“Until people’s real earnings start increasing again - and they’ve been decreasing over the last three years - it’s going to be very difficult [to buy a home],” Rubin said. “Then you have to bring down interest rates in order to make the mortgages affordable, and the only way to do that is to get to sound fiscal policies.”
With government policy continually failing to fix what he sees as the root of the country’s economic issues, Rubin founded Main Street Economics to spread awareness and educate the public about economic policy and its impact. While not an economist himself, Rubin has decades of experience studying the subject and founded the nonprofit organization to give “average people on ‘main street’ the opportunity to learn about economic systems without going back to school,” according to their website.
“That’s really the reason I started Main Street Economics, which has become my passion to try and crusade for sound fiscal policy,” he said. “That’s the only solution in the long run to help young people, young kids starting out to be able to afford a house.”
He further described his mission with Main Street as “trying to alert people to the problem and get fiscal responsibility in Washington D.C.” as the national debt is projected to continue skyrocketing. To learn more about Main Street Economics, visit mainstreeteconomics.org.
For more information and insights into all things economics, see the full interview with Rubin at the top of this story, on Riverbender.com/video, or on the Riverbender.com Roku TV app.
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