McCormick said he believes it’s “really almost indisputable” what the cause of inflation is: Government spending.

“Wages haven’t kept up,” McCormick said. “It’s had a huge impact on Pennsylvanians.”

“Republicans and Democrats alike have been spending too much for the past 20 years,” he said. “But under President Biden there’s a $5 trillion spike in new spending.”

“The second cause of it has been really a war on fossil fuels,” McCormick said. “Fossil fuels have become much more restricted.”

Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., speaks at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Aug. 22, 2024 in Chicago.

He noted a pause on development of liquified natural gas, cancellation of the Keystone pipeline and scheduled EPA mandates to have 70% of cars, trucks and SUVs on the road be electric by 2032.

“We’ve got to develop and open up our energy sector,” he said.

“One of the drivers of that are corporate profits,” Casey said, citing a Federal Reserve report that profits drove 41% of inflation in the U.S. “That’s one of the causes of inflation.”

He touted legislation he has prioritized to expose the role corporate profit plays in the higher prices Americans are paying, including specifically through hidden fees or reducing the size of consumer goods, and to enable the Federal Trade Commission to better penalize price-gouging.

“I have a lot of big companies pretty mad at me right now,” Casey said. “They’re angry that I’ve exposed what they were doing, which is to take advantage of a pandemic and the post-pandemic period.”

“Big corporations and very very wealthy Americans have won almost every single battle over the tax code,” he said. “These are big battles waged by hundreds and hundreds and over time thousands of corporate lobbyists and lobbyists that are lobbying on behalf of powerful interests.”

Casey noted the American Rescue Plan, which he said provided “a big tax break to families raising children, where we took the child tax credit and turbo-charged it.”

“The child tax credit gave families in Pennsylvania more than $400 a month to help raise their children,” Casey said, arguing most of Pennsylvania’s families used the money to cover grocery costs or to help pay rent.

“We have a golden opportunity in 2025 to utilize the tax code to give families some relief, to give the middle class some relief, instead of doing what Washington has been doing for decade after decade, which is awarding the wealthiest Americans and big corporations all of the benefits,” Casey said.

“I think we need to lower taxes, I think we need to extend the Trump tax cuts,” McCormick said, while cautioning that such measures were not necessarily about solving inflation. “Those have been very important for working families. A family of four that makes $52,000 a year got a $2,500 tax break under that tax plan.”

He warned that a Harris administration, working with a reelected Casey, would raise taxes.

McCormick said he would like to boost tax credits for families with children and pursue other policies to “make it easier for people to save in ways that support child care.”

He said this array of policies would be particularly beneficial to families working paycheck to paycheck.

In preventing future inflationary spirals, McCormick said he thinks “government has been more a problem than a solution.”

“Eighty percent of the jobs in Pennsylvania are created by small businesses,” he said.

He explained that, when he talks to people, they say the “biggest problems they have, that are standing in the way of them creating more jobs, good-paying jobs, is inflation … it’s regulation — too much government, the cost of doing business is getting more and more expensive because of government intervention, and nowhere is that more clear than the energy sector.”

“I think we have to make sure in the future that big, multinational corporations that have engaged in this predatory ‘greedflation,’ and have pretty much gotten away with because we don’t have that law in place that provides a bulwark against that” are subject to investigation and penalty, Casey said, calling to “level the playing field” with the Federal Trade Commission again.

“We have to continue to make sure that consumers have the information they need. … I think giving consumers information is critically important,” he said.