NEW🗞️: The Defense Production Act sometimes gets narrowly cast as mainly a national security law. But as I show in a Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator paper, the DPA actually has a long history as an anti-inflation law. 🧵(1/8) - ThreadSky

joeldodge07.bsky.social • 3 days ago

NEW🗞️: The Defense Production Act sometimes gets narrowly cast as mainly a national security law. But as I show in a Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator paper, the DPA actually has a long history as an anti-inflation law. 🧵(1/8)

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amphoenixtrade.bsky.social•3 days ago

Eisenhower supported an anti-price-gouging law during the Korean War and also believed that oligopolies can drive inflation. Analogizing pandemic supply shocks to wartime supply shocks is exactly right.

joeldodge07.bsky.social•3 days ago

Read the full paper here: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/412/2025/03/06135337/The-Anti-Inflation-Defense-Production-Act.pdf (2/8)

joeldodge07.bsky.social•3 days ago

After FDR successfully intervened to control inflation during WW2, the Truman administration sought similar powers to deal with postwar inflation.

In fact, the legislation that became the DPA was originally called "the Economic Stabilization Act." (3/8)

joeldodge07.bsky.social•3 days ago

The DPA originally included price controls, which again succeeded in restraining inflation in 1951 (until a hostile Congress gutted them). (4/8)

joeldodge07.bsky.social•3 days ago

In the early '70s, Nixon begrudgingly deployed (politically motivated) price controls under the DPA to mixed results. Controls fell out of favor thereafter. (5/8)

joeldodge07.bsky.social•3 days ago

Still today, the DPA provides the president with several tools to combat inflation: (6/8)

joeldodge07.bsky.social•3 days ago

But Congress should add more, including:
🎯Targeted price stabilization
🚫A stronger ban on price-gouging
🐕Empowered consumers as "profiteering watchdogs"
🏦Strategic credit controls
(7/8)

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