In an attempt to allay the fears of potential supporters in the grocery industry who see economic disaster in Vice President Kamala Harris’ food price control plan, surrogates are suggesting it’s a moot point.
In an attempt to allay the fears of potential supporters in the grocery industry who see economic disaster in Vice President Kamala Harris’ food price control plan, surrogates are suggesting it’s a moot point and will never be approved by Congress.
After Harris released her plans for price controls across economic sectors, "Kamunism" trended on X. The fiscal policy has also been referred to by former President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as "communist." However, Republicans are not the only ones who see scarcity on the shelves with Harris’s plans. The grocery store industry and even some economists usually sympathetic to Democrats are also alarmed, Politico reported.
According to unnamed Democrats in Congress and Congressional aides, neither price controls nor price gouging bills will sail into law anytime soon. The sources claimed this is all about talking points and trying to convince voters that even though Harris was the second part of the Biden-Harris administration, she is trying to shift the blame for inflation from President Joe Biden to corporations.
“It’s clear to me these are very general, very lofty goals,” said one of the anonymous Democratic lawmakers. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) agreed with that sentiment, telling NBC News’ Meet the Press that people shouldn’t be reading too much into what has been put out there,” because Harris is just talking in “broad strokes.”
The Harris plan would also require a degree of antitrust busting that would not move easily through either the House or Senate, Politico noted. “I honestly still don’t know how this would work,” another unnamed Democrat in Congress told the outlet.
Some analysts are wondering just where Harris is getting her policy advice that increasingly favors government control – from food prices to housing. Since she started to talk about “price gouging” instead of price controls, the Harris campaign has insisted this won’t necessitate broad emergency powers that could be aimed at any corporation deemed to be making too much money. Instead, it would only target “bad actors."
Harris' economic advisor Brian Nelson spoke about the “price gouging” plan at the Democratic National Convention and tried to disarm critics by assuring the public that the federal government would only intervene to stop “price gouging” in a national emergency.
“She’s going to work with Congress to ensure that it is directed at bad actors, bad activity,” Nelson said. “It’s not meant to set prices or price levels or anything like that. And that is not the way current state laws around price gouging are.” However, not only could the Harris advisor not clarify what would constitute an emergency, but he could not cite any examples of corporations who are guilty of “price gouging.”
“That’s why I think it’s not a serious policy,” a food industry source told Politico.
“I’m sure it polls well,” the person said. “But it’s an obvious effort to deflect blame from her administration on inflation.” Grocery stores are already operating at low profit levels and the thought that they are fueling inflation after the trillions spent by the Biden-Harris administration on imagined Covid relief and questionable infrastructure bills strikes grocery store owners as both unfair and mendacious.
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