For Immediate Release: February 20, 2020

Press Contact: Carli Kientzle at carli@npstrategygroup.com

ECONOMIC LIBERTIES DECRIES TRUMP EMBRACE OF CORPORATE MONOPOLIES

Washington, DC — Today, the Economic Liberties project slammed the Trump administration’s sham economic analysis that embraces corporate monopolies over consumers and businesses.

“Their analysis is a slap in the face to consumers, workers, and the business community,” said Economic Liberties’ Executive Director Sarah Miller. “It is so divorced from reality that it’s unfair to even call it an analysis, because they’re intentionally sticking their heads in the sand to ignore basic facts that Democrats and Republicans increasingly agree on. Giant corporate monopolies have a stranglehold on our society. Breaking their power is essential to solving problems from sky-high prescription drug prices and the crisis in farming communities, to the rampant privacy abuses of tech monopolies and collapse of small business. ”

The Trump report ignores the clear and bipartisan economic consensus on the dangers of monopolies:

• In the last twenty years the average size of publicly-traded firms has tripled. And the number of publicly-traded firms has fallen by 50 percent.

• More than 75 percent of industries have become more concentrated over the past 20 years, experiencing a 90 percent increase in concentration levels on average—without increased efficiency.

• The combination of higher prices and lower wages—both the result of corporate consolidation—costs the average American household $5,000 a year in lost purchasing power.

• On average, mergers between companies result in a 7 percent price increase.

• Median annual compensation—now only $33,000—would be more than $10,000 higher if employers were less concentrated.

• Employment is roughly 13 percent less today than it would be in a competitive market.

• New business creation is at a 40-year low, with business deaths now outpacing business starts.

• The number of startups launched annually has fallen by nearly half since the 1970s.

• Between 1997 and 2012, the share of total business revenue going to firms with fewer than 100 employees fell by nearly one-fifth, from twenty-nine to twenty-four percent.

• In finance, the share of banking assets held by mega-banks rose from seventeen percent in 1995 to fifty-nine percent today.

Read the New York Times profile on Sarah Miller and Economic Liberties here

Learn more about Economic Liberties here

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Economic Liberties works to ensure America’s system of commerce is structured to advance, rather than undermine, economic liberty, fair commerce, and a secure, inclusive democracy. AELP believes true economic liberty means entrepreneurs and businesses large and small succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work; commerce empowers consumers, workers, farmers, and engineers instead of subjecting them to discrimination and abuse from financiers and monopolists; foreign trade arrangements support domestic security and democracy; and wealth is broadly distributed to support equitable political power.