Jason Furman, a former economist for President Barack Obama, slammed Vice President Kamala Harris’s price control policy as “a lot of rhetoric and no reality” on Thursday.
Harris blamed soaring food inflation on corporations gouging consumers. Her remedy entails a federal ban on gouging through socialist-style price controls.
“This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” Furman told the New York Times on Thursday.
“There’s no upside here, and there is some downside,” he added.
Furman was not the only high-profile lefty to attack Harris’s policy. Catherine Rampell, an opinionist for the Washington Post, slammed the policy as idiotic:
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.
Prices under the Biden-Harris administration increased about 20 percent across the board. Grocery prices, for context, increased 26 percent, according to the Department of Labor.
Fast food chains are under pressure to put the “value” back into “value meals” since their prices soared 33 percent since 2019. A Big Mac burger, a medium beverage, and a medium fries meal now costs $18 in some locations, up $10 from 2018 when former President Donald Trump was in office.
Eighty-seven percent of Americans believe the administration’s policies either hurt or had no impact on inflation, the number one issue among respondents, a Monmouth University poll found in June.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
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