Vowing to help Americans with their soaring grocery bills, Harris announced last week she has an idea: The federal government will fix the problem.
If elected president in November, she plans to use the power of the White House to crack down on “price gouging” in the food and grocery industry.
“My plan,” she said at a North Carolina campaign rally Friday, “will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules.”
Beyond just her own campaign idea, it could be tied to a U.S. Senate bill called the Price Gouging Prevention Act which Harris has endorsed, Catherine Rampell, a Washington Post columnist, told CNN.
Preston Brashers, a tax policy expert at The Heritage Foundation, tells AFN he is stunned Harris is accusing an industry, with a two-percent profit margin, of price gouging its customers.
“It's either a case of demagoguery or economic illiteracy here,” he says.
That criticism is no surprise coming from an analyst at Heritage, a conservative think tank, but liberal news outlets have piled on Harris, too.
“This is not sensible policy,” Jason Furman, an economist for the Obama administration, told The New York Times. “And I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality.”
In a related CNN story, Rampell gave a blunt warning on the liberal news network beginning with the federal government defining what “price gauging” and “excessive prices” means.
“We’ve seen this kind of thing tried in lots of other countries before: Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union,” she said. “It leads to shortages. It leads to black markets. Plenty of uncertainty.”
During that live segment, Rampell surmised that Harris would likely implement the policy by signing the Price Gouging Prevention Act as president.
As written, Rampell said, the bill could actually increase prices, she also warned.
Biden blamed inflation on 'corporate greed'
Grocery prices have jumped as high as 30% during the Biden-Harris administration. That jump can be attributed to record-high inflation, not seen since the 1980s, and also to a supply chain crisis created by 100-plus cargo ships waiting for weeks to unload their goods in the Los Angeles harbor.
Rather than own up to creating the inflation problem, since inflation is solely related to the federal government borrowing money, President Biden blamed “corporate greed” for soaring grocery prices and for gas prices at the pump.
When the cargo ships were piling up in the L.A. harbor, the American public learned Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is homosexual, had taken two months of “paternity leave” to spend time with twin newborns with his partner, Chasten.
"When somebody welcomes a new child into their family and goes on leave to take care of that child, that's not a vacation. It's work,” Buttigieg told NBC News in a 2021 interview.
Looking ahead to a Harris-Walz administration, Brashers predicts any attempt at cracking down on grocery store prices will have disastrous results. That would likely mean food shortages and companies being driven out of business – all because the federal government, which is largely to blame, promised to fix the problem.
“This is the sort of thing they've tried in countries like Venezuela and the former Soviet Union,” he says. “The truth is markets know a lot better about what prices should be than any politician, and certainly Vice President Harris."
