Vice President Kamala Harris has faced enormous backlash over her proposal to enact price controls on groceries amid the rampant inflation the Biden-Harris administration has been accused of creating through its disastrous policies. Among the many critics, the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell recently published a scathing opinion piece that stressed that it is “hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is.”
Following the unveiling of her economic agenda, Harris has been criticized for embodying “communist” policies that revolve around central planning. Therefore, Rampell’s piece is titled, “When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?” Many have blasted Harris for proposing policies that undercut free-market principles in something that would be seen in the Soviet Union.
Rampell argues that the blame on “corporate greed” is an attempt to deflect the blame on increased grocery prices away from the Biden-Harris administration. “It’s not hard to figure out where this proposal came from,” the essay reads. “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed.” The piece claims, “Harris has chosen the latter.”
Harris has criticized “excessive” corporate profits in her rhetoric, promising to ban price gouging in her first 100 days as president. However, as Rampell points out, what determines this subjective assessment of the profit margins, which are already razor-thin? “What are these ‘clear rules of the road’ or the thresholds that determine when a price or profit level becomes ‘excessive’?” she wrote.
The opinion piece continued, “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.” Rampell added, “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.”
Rampell suggested that the vice president’s advisers are wholly incompetent and ignorant of the history that demonstrates central planning is flawed. “Harris’s economic advisers are either too confused or lazy to tell the difference,” she said. “They don’t seem to know the history of these kinds of policies and apparently haven’t thought very hard about what would make markets more competitive or improve the lives of voters.”
Former President Donald Trump recently weighed in on Kamala Harris’ economic plans, blasting them as communist. “Now Kamala is reportedly proposing communist price controls, she wants price controls,” Trump said. “And if they worked, I’d go along with it, too, but they don’t work. They exactly have the exact opposite impact and effect and it leads to food shortages, rationing, hunger, dramatically more inflation.”
Trump continued, “She’s running on the Maduro plan. we call it the Maduro plan, like something straight out of Venezuela or the Soviet Union. this announcement is an admission that her economic policies have totally failed, and caused really a catastrophe for our country and beyond that, a catastrophe in the world. Watch Trump below:
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