Price discrimination is the reallocation of surplus from consumers to producers. It doesn’t pass down, capturing the surplus is why producers like to do it. 1/

That’s not to say that things that look sort of like price discrimination can’t be good for consumer welfare. If grocery stores would have thrown away goods they sell somehow only to the poor for cheap, selling rather than throwing can be welfare improving! 2/

But where the goods would have been allocated in a single price competitive market absent price discrimination, the price discrimination is a pure loss to consumers in aggregate. 3/

If the price discrimination isn’t perfect some consumers may benefit at the expense of others. That’s the basis for the progressivity claims. But the putatively virtuous redistribution helps launder a drain against consumers in aggregate. /fin