Vice President Kamala Harris has enjoyed an avalanche of media praise since becoming the Democrat Party’s presidential nominee but that goodwill has crashed.
The vice president rolled out a Soviet-style anti-price gouging plan last week that had even some of her most ardent media supporters attacking her.
The Washington Post Editorial Board shredded the Harris plan in an opinion piece published right after the announcement.
“Vice President Kamala Harris’s speech Friday was an opportunity to get specific with voters about how a Harris presidency would manage an economy that many feel is not working well for them,” the board said on Friday. “Unfortunately, instead of delivering a substantial plan, she squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.”
“One way to handle it might be to level with voters, telling them that inflation spiked in 2021 mainly because the pandemic snarled supply chains, and that the Federal Reserve’s policies, which the Biden-Harris administration supported, are working to slow it,” the editorial board said. “The vice president instead opted for a less forthright route: Blaming big business.”
And CNN economics reporter Elisabeth Buchwald was just as vicious in her assessment.
“Food prices have surged by more than 20% under the Biden-Harris administration, leaving many voters eager to stretch their dollars further at the grocery store. On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris said she has a solution: a federal ban on price gouging across the food industry, she said.
The reporter mentioned Harris’ quote in which she said she would penalize “opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules.”
“There’s just one issue: Harris’ proposal could create more problems than the one it’s trying to solve, some economists say. Gavin Roberts studied anti-price gouging laws some states passed during the pandemic. One of the biggest effects he observed, especially at grocery stores, was that these laws motivated people ‘to go buy goods more than they would if prices had risen,’” she said.
“When prices are high, in most cases, the best policy action in response is actually taking no action, Roberts, the chair of Weber State University’s economics department, told CNN. That would cause consumers who are deterred by, say, high prices of beef, to instead purchase another type of meat or protein. That helps keep beef on the grocery store shelves for people who want it enough to pay the higher prices,” the reporter said.
“And while Harris claims her proposal ‘will help the food industry become more competitive,’ Roberts said it would do just the opposite. ‘It’s more likely to maintain that status quo,’ he said because it would keep new competition from moving in to take advantage of the bigger profit margins — competition that could have helped lower prices in the long run,” she said.
“This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” Obama administration economist Jason Furman said to The New York Times. “There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”
And Buchwald warned that a campaign fact sheet said Harris has plans for “the federal government to identify and take on price-fixing and other anti-competitive practices in the food and grocery industries.”
Fox Business host Charles Payne, a frequent critic of Harris, was stunned by her plan.
“It’s a lot, right? I mean, it’s essentially what we’re talking about, this gargantuan big government that controls everything. What we’re talking about is a war on capitalism,” the host and economic expert said.
“They really do not believe in capitalism. And to be quite honest, Dave, when I sat down, I heard you talking about how this has surprised some people. I was never… I never bought in that she was shifting her spots, you know,” Payne continued.
