Here are the 10 ways the Democrats increase prices for goods and services for the poor.
1. Urban Democrats throughout America try to ban Walmart, Target and many other low-cost stores from their cities. The cost of nearly everything at Walmart and Target is lower than at the stores urbanites have to shop at. Direct effect on poor people.
2. The standard way for Democrats to raise taxes for their many policies is to tax wine, liquor and cigarettes. These products are used disproportionately by poor people. These taxes are a direct levy on the poor.
3. The Democratic Party, in nearly all Democrat-controlled states, increases the number of licenses for semiskilled retailers. Licenses are required for barbers, beauty salons, manicurists, acupuncturists, massage and a long list of semiskilled nonprofessional occupations. The only people hurt by this are the poor. They cannot get inexpensive services and they cannot easily create work for themselves.
4. The Democratic party has always been a strong opponent of free trade agreements. For over 200 years economists have explained that increases in international trade reduce costs. If Italy can produce leather shoes at a lower price, then free trade will bring lower-cost shoes to the United States. The Italians, conversely, will buy the lower cost architectural engineering services from the United States. The poor benefit the most from lower-cost goods and services. They are hurt the most by tariffs and trade barriers.
5. The Democratic Party is owned and supported disproportionately by unions. Unions thrive by limiting the number of employees the company can hire. This is done by raising retirement costs, health costs and creating unwieldy work rules. The consequence is fewer people get jobs in unionized shops, and the poor people with the fewest skills are the ones most frequently excluded.
6. One party has been the strongest advocate of welfare, food stamps and disability payments. These are essential for people who genuinely need them, but the absence of careful criteria for their usage and the Democratic party opposition to means testing (checking to see if the welfare recipient owns $1 million house) has detrimental effects on the poor community. With a heavy presence of non-working peers in a neighborhood, there is encouragement to young people to choose a life of sloth and dependence. Such encouragement is a disability to the poor in and of itself.
7. The Democratic Party has been a national opponent of school vouchers. Such vouchers are used to escape the lowest quality public schools. Since these schools are disproportionately in poor neighborhoods with low income students, this policy causes direct lifetime harm for the poor.
8. The Democratic Party has been the sole pressure to create and raise the minimum wage. This is because the party is in the thrall of unions and unions know that raising the minimum wage will raise the already higher union wages. In simple supply and demand terms, when you raise the price of a good or service there is less demand for it. When the price of labor is raised by a minimum wage law the number of people employed declines. This is particularly true for young people and people with minimum skills. This hurts the poor more than anything else that the Democratic Party does.
9. The Democratic Party has long been the source of price and cost controls. It was Democrats who allowed wholesalers to set retail prices for decades before courts threw it out. A Democrat administration has reinstituted this rule after a 50-year absence. The Party sets minimum prices for milk and milk products and many other agricultural products. The Democrats created the fantasy need for ethanol that dramatically raises the price of corn for poor people in Mexico, Egypt, and the world. Everything is more costly for the poor, including food. Especially food.
Urban Democrats always support rent control. Since poor people move more frequently than any other population except young people, rent control does not benefit them at all. Most poor people leave the urban center as rapidly as possible if they cannot get public housing. The public housing, of course, is filled with graffiti and is dangerous. A distinctly poor problem.
10. School busing was a necessary policy in the government mandated segregation of the Jim Crow South. In the urban North, segregation was real but not created by government policy. The urban North school busing had two effects: it carried the criminally dangerous behavior of ghetto neighborhoods into all schools, making life for the poor a relentless environment of danger. Busing also drove middle-class populations out of the cities and out of the public schools. It left public schools with seriously diminished parent support and a rapid decline in quality of education for those remaining in public urban schools.
Summary: the Democratic party is shockingly harmful to the poor of America. That is not the intent of its policies, but that is its effect...unambiguously.