The Washington Post is blasting Kamala Harris’ economic plan to use the federal government to bully manufacturers into bringing prices down instead of addressing the root causes of inflation; When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls? WaPo contributor Catherine Rampell writes.
“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad Kamala Harris’s price-gouging proposal is,” Rampell continues.
From The Washington Post:
“Price gouging” is the focus of Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic agenda, her presidential campaign says. She’ll crack down on “excessive prices” and “excessive corporate profits,” particularly for groceries.
It’s not hard to figure out where this proposal came from. Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.
In a news release Wednesday, her campaign said the first 100 days of her presidency would include the “first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”
What are these “clear rules of the road” or the thresholds that determine when a price or profit level becomes “excessive”? The memo doesn’t say, and the campaign did not answer questions I sent seeking clarification.
…
It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.
Full op-ed over at The Washington Post:
From @crampell: When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls? https://t.co/MvL8aYstCZ
— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) August 16, 2024