Kamala Harris spent weeks avoiding press interviews, press conferences, and even making any bold policy announcements. However, on Friday, she unveiled her economic agenda, and it was such a disaster that something tells me it's back to the basement for Kamala.
First, a liberal columnist at the Washington Post trashed Kamala's price control plan, and now, a Harvard economist who served in the Obama administration is also blasting the proposal.
"This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality," Jason Furman told The New York Times. "There’s no upside here, and there is some downside."
Furman, the former National Economic Council chair under Obama, also told the paper that Harris' policies are risky because they deter new businesses from entering the market to satisfy consumer demand.
The proposal is essentially Soviet-style price controls disguised as a federal ban on price-gouging. It aims to achieve two objectives: shifting the blame for inflation away from the Biden-Harris administration's economic policies and onto corporate greed, while also trying to convince the public that Harris has the solution to solve the problem.
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"There's a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business," the Harris campaign said in a statement after the proposal was announced.
Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell previously blasted Kamala's policy proposal in a column Thursday evening.
"It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is," she wrote. "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."
At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat. (There’s a reason narrower “price gouging” laws that exist in some U.S. states are rarely invoked.) At worst, it might accidentally raise prices.
That’s because, among other things, the legislation would ban companies from offering lower prices to a big customer such as Costco than to Joe’s Corner Store, which means quantity discounts are in trouble. Worse, it would require public companies to publish detailed internal data about costs, margins, contracts and their future pricing strategies. Posting cost and pricing plans publicly is a fantastic way for companies to collude to keep prices higher — all facilitated by the government.
"If your opponent claims you’re a 'communist,' maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls," Rampbell concluded.
Helen Raleigh, an immigrant who once lived in communist China, also blasted the policy in a post on X/Twitter.
“Government-imposed price control is a terrible idea because it makes the economy worse by causing shortages," she wrote. "Everyone who survived socialism/communism knows this: if the store shelves are empty, it doesn’t matter how low the government claims the price of bread is.”
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