You’re paying a lot more for diapers while NC leaders keep giving corporations a free ride

People in North Carolina are facing high prices for food, gas, diapers, and other necessities, and policymakers are failing to make policies that address the rising costs of everyday life.

A significant driver of these high prices is greedflation, or the practice of excessive pricing that corporations use during inflationary periods. Corporate profits as a share of national income have skyrocketed by 29% since the start of the pandemic.

We know that corporate greed is driving inflation, but instead of taxing corporate profits to  ensure they pay what they owe, our NC lawmakers continue to propose policies and budgets that help these wealthy corporations at the expense of everyday North Carolinians.

Budget proposals approved by the Senate and House last week, but not enacted into final law by the fiscal year deadline, didn’t do enough to address families’ rising costs directly specifically by making child care more affordable. Instead, they passed a stop-gap measure that doesn’t provide the kind of stability desperately needed to ensure child-care providers remain open.

Adding insult to injury, policymakers once again failed to stop the next corporate income tax rate reduction in 2025, another step toward corporations having a ZERO percent income tax rate after 2030. This could have gone some way to funding people’s priorities for their families and communities, and high profits show that big corporations can easily pay what they owe.

Economic data and CEO’s own statements contain significant evidence that greedflation is a real driver of high prices.

Researchers have found that more than half of inflation between April and September 2023 was driven by corporate profits.

CEOs admit this directly. During shareholder briefings, corporate leaders have explicitly named their pricing practices as key to record profits, even as the cost of their materials has fallen.

In just one example, Procter & Gamble’s CFO told shareholders in their October 2023 earnings call that they attributed one-third of profits in the past quarter to lower materials costs, and that high prices were the other key driver.

These prices hit families hard: Proctor & Gamble, along with one other company producing diapers, holds up to 80 percent of the disposable diaper market and thus can raise prices with little risk of losing consumers. From 2021 to 2023, the price of diapers rose along with the cost of materials (mainly wood pulp, the main input in diaper manufacturing.) But when material costs fell steeply during 2023, Proctor & Gamble kept their prices high.  The result is that families have continued to pay high prices for this basic consumer good in recent years so corporations can increase their profits.

State corporate income taxes are a key policy to reign in bad corporate behavior and ensure that highly profitable corporations support our communities instead of just enriching their shareholders. That’s because when corporations are taxed on their profits, they have less incentive for profiteering by raising prices.

The problem facing North Carolinians, though, is that the state’s corporate income tax is set to be eliminated by 2030. State policymakers who have championed zero corporate income taxes are paving the way for corporations to continue profiting off our labor and our paying their high prices without contributing to our communities through their taxes.

If North Carolinians want to see prices get back to normal, one thing we can do now is demand that policymakers make corporations pay what they owe through income taxes.