After weeks of running the most nonsubstantive campaign, completely devoid of interviews, press conferences, and policy proposals—but loaded with flip-flops—Kamala Harris has finally started to reveal some policies to the American people. It’s not going well.
The first policy she dropped was Donald Trump’s “No Tax on Tips” plan, and even the media couldn’t ignore the fact she’d plagiarized that idea from him. Her latest attempt to come up with something original hasn’t gone much better. In fact, it’s already starting to look like a train wreck, and she hasn’t even officially unveiled it yet.
The proposal, of course, is Soviet-style price controls branded as a federal ban on price-gouging. The proposal tries to kill two birds with one stone by simultaneously deflecting blame for inflation onto corporate greed—rather than the economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration—and convincing the public that she has the solution to fix it.
But the proposal is so horrifying bad, that Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell absolutely destroyed it in a column Thursday evening.
Rampell, a liberal, pulls no punches in her piece. She asserts that it is "hard to exaggerate how bad Kamala Harris’s price-gouging proposal is."
"The most likely template for Harris’s proposal is a recent bill from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). (Harris co-sponsored similar legislation with Warren in 2020, when Harris was a senator.),” Rampell writes. "Warren’s bill would ban any 'grossly excessive price' during any 'atypical disruption' of a market."
"Alas, no definition was provided for these terms, either; rather, the bill would empower the Federal Trade Commission to enforce bans using any metric it deems appropriate,” she continues.
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.
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.
Rampbell clearly believes that this terrible proposal from Kamala will play right into Trump’s hands. "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."
And that’s why Kamala Harris has been hiding from the media and the American people.
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