Click here to view this content.
Kamala Harris’s plans to ban corporations from “price gouging” will never happen, Democrats have reportedly admitted.
Democrats in Congress have reassured allies that the vice-president’s economic plans are unworkable, and that it is a political tactic to shift the blame for inflation, according to Politico.
Ms Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, said earlier this month that she would target “bad actors” among grocery chains and wholesalers artificially inflating prices to expand their profit margins if she wins the election.
Her plans would amount to the first federal ban on food “price gouging”, giving the Federal Trade Commission the power to prosecute companies that “excessively” increase prices.
“It’s clear to me these are very general, very lofty goals,” one Democratic lawmaker said of the proposal, which has drawn a backlash from the food industry and economists.
“I honestly still don’t know how this would work,” another congressional Democrat admitted.
Democrats have privately framed the policy as a messaging tactic that is meant to show how Ms Harris understands food prices have become a serious burden for Americans, rather than a serious economic proposal.
Inflation commonly ranks as the top issue for voters ahead of November’s election. Grocery prices are up 20 per cent from four years ago when Donald Trump was in office, while staples such as eggs cost almost twice as much.
Trump, who has fiercely criticised Ms Harris’s “communist” plan, has repeatedly attempted to tie the vice president to surging food prices during Joe Biden’s time in the White House.
One Democrat familiar with the Harris campaign’s thinking blamed a Washington Post editorial for distorting her proposal and suggesting that she favoured sweeping price controls.
After Ms Harris announced the policy on Aug 16, in her first major policy speech of the campaign, the liberal-leaning newspaper said she had “squandered the moment on populist gimmicks” instead of “delivering a substantial plan”.
“This gambit by Ms. Harris has been met with almost instant scepticism, with many critics citing President Richard Nixon’s failed price controls from the 1970s,” it added. “Whether the Harris proposal wins over voters remains to be seen, but if sound economic analysis still matters, it won’t.”
Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor and an ally of Ms Harris, said last week that the policy was intended to address inflation in “broad strokes” and that “people are reading too much into what has been put out there”.
Trump accused Ms Harris of “proposing communist price control”, adding: “if they worked, I’d go all along with it, but they don’t work. They actually have the exact opposite impact and effect.”
“We call it the ‘Maduro plan’, like something straight out of Venezuela or the Soviet Union,” he said this month, referencing Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president.
Source Agencies
