Kamala Harris finally decided to drop some key economic agenda items last week, and you’d have to be living under a rock to not know that it was a disaster. Kamala was blasted from both sides of the aisle for proposing dangerous policies that are likely to make the problems she claims to want to fix even worse.
The most notable example of this was her proposed federal ban on “price-gouging,” which was blasted by liberal Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell and even an Obama economist.
"It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is,” Rampell wrote Thursday evening. "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."
"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, the former National Economic Council chair under Obama, told the New York Times. "There’s no upside here, and there is some downside."
Rampell reports that Kamala Harris is already trying to walk back the proposal with softened rhetoric after being pounded with criticism for such terrible policy
"It was interesting to me that she seems to have toned down some of the rhetoric that her campaign was putting out earlier this week on the price gouging stuff,” she told CNN’s Julia Chatterley. "If you look at the materials that the campaign had sent out a few days ago to reporters—perhaps you received them as well, Julia—it was about punishing companies for raising prices above their costs and things like that, and echoed some bill text that is currently sitting in the Senate, proposed by Senators Bob Casey and Elizabeth Warren. That is basically price controls."
Related: Even An Obama Economist is Trashing Kamala's Price Control Plan
Rampell continued, "Casey seems to think she has endorsed his bill. He put out a press release today saying she had, but the speech text itself was much more restrained and basically talked about, you know, enforcing existing antitrust laws."
"So, you know, I think she -- there may be attuned to some of the criticism they've received. You're right. It was very light on details. And I think we should expect that going forward because the more details they put out the more scrutiny it'll get. As long as it's a lofty idea like, we're just going to reduce the deficit without saying how, you know, it's easy to get behind."
Rampell also didn’t think too much of Kamala promising $25,000 downpayment assistance for first-time homebuyers.
"I'm more concerned about another policy that she had -- she has released on housing to give first-time home buyers I think it was a $25,000 dollar tax credit, which sounds nice, but demand is already really strong. If you do have constrained supply, that tax credit is likely just going to get passed along in the form of higher prices,” she accurately pointed out. "It's just going to make housing prices, you know, $25,000 -- maybe not the full $25,000 but more expensive. It’s going to go into the pocket of sellers."
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