Vice President Kamala Harris’ proposed “price gouging” ban has been panned as a radical policy, and some Democrats and members of the press are working to clean up the fallout.
During an Aug. 16 speech in North Carolina laying out some of her economic ideas, Harris proposed to impose a federal ban on “price gouging” to bring down prices of food and groceries, an idea that critics from across the political spectrum derided as collectivist price controls, extreme and unlikely to work. In the week since Harris announced her idea, numerous Democrats and some prominent media personalities and outlets have mobilized to redefine or explain away Harris’ proposal as more nuanced and less radical than the GOP is making it out to be.
After Harris’ proposal received sharp criticisms from economists and pundits, unnamed sources familiar with the vice president’s thinking told The New York Times that the “price gouging” ban would likely only take effect in emergencies, such as a pandemic or in the wake of a natural disaster. However, since America is currently not facing such circumstances, those unnamed sources implied that it “might actually not do anything to bring down grocery prices right now” if enacted.
‘Most Terrifying Proposal I’ve Ever Seen’: Former Trump Economic Advisor Reacts To Kamala Harris ‘Price Gouging’ Planhttps://t.co/hhJgw3BhV7
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 17, 2024
Nevertheless, Democrats and some in the media have attempted essentially to defend the proposal by suggesting it isn’t so simple.
Axios ran a Tuesday story under the headline “How price gouging bans really work.” The article states that policies like the one Harris proposed are “oft-hated by economists, but they’ve been around for a long time” and that “most Americans intuitively understand the rationale behind them, and Harris is trying to appeal to voters — not academics or newspaper columnists.”
The Axios story cites Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham Law School, for color; Teachout wrote her own Thursday piece for The Atlantic with the headline “Sometimes You Just Have to Ignore the Economists.” In her column, Teachout writes that “Kamala Harris’s proposed price-gouging ban might irritate academics, but it makes sense to everyone else,” simultaneously defending the policy as neither radical nor novel while conceding that its exact parameters are unclear.
Paul Krugman, an economist and columnist for The New York Times, described Harris’ economic ideas, including the price gouging ban, as “a solid center-left agenda” in a Monday column.
“I’ve been amazed at how many credulous commentators, and not just on the right, have asserted that Harris is calling for price controls, making her out to be the second coming of Richard Nixon if not the next Nicolas Maduro,” Krugman wrote in his column. “What she has actually called for is legislation banning price gouging on groceries. Obviously, this is a populist political gesture — a way to offer something to voters upset about high food prices. But just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it’s a bad idea.”
The Trump campaign’s assertion that Harris has embraced communist-style price controls is simply “a new line of false attack” against the vice president, CBS anchor Margaret Brennan said on “Face the Nation” on Sunday. CBS also brought Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear onto the program to discuss why Harris’ proposal is more nuanced than outright socialist price controls.
Gretchen Whitmer Says Critics Of Harris’ Price Gouging Plan Are ‘Reading Too Much’ Into Ithttps://t.co/h8GWuL2xvB
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 20, 2024
“It’s definitely clear that at least a few corporate journalists are trying to defend Kamala’s proposal. But it’s a very unenviable task,” Bill Da’Agostino, a senior research analyst for the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog organization, told the DCNF. “She proposed price controls, so now they’re going to bat for price controls. Moments like these are when the real hacks expose themselves.”
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who recently said that she does not believe a new government report showing that 818,000 jobs purportedly created under the Biden administration never actually existed, also stepped in to deflect criticism of Harris’ plan. She described the notion that Harris’ proposal amounts to price controls as “a Republican talking point,” during a Wednesday appearance on CNBC.
Democratic Govs. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan have also attempted to downplay or contextualize Harris’ proposal as more nuanced than outright price controls, according to The Washington Post. Some of the criticisms of Harris’ “price gouging” ban have been made in good faith by some observers, but there are other criticisms of the policy that are “just malicious attacks from the other side trying to characterize her as a socialist,” Ben Harris, a former senior official at the Biden Treasury Department, told the outlet.
“Her idea flopped badly. They can’t just withdraw it, so they have to ‘contextualize’ it, hence the references to a pandemic or national emergency,” J.D. Foster, the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and a former vice president of the Chamber of Commerce, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It was a dumb idea and they are stuck with it as an example of Harris’ extreme ignorance about how the economy works.”
Ryan Young, senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, agreed that Harris’ proposed federal “price gouging” ban is effectively an endorsement of price controls.
“Most voters are too young to remember Richard Nixon’s price and wage controls, but they still have the right intuition—you don’t want politicians setting prices,” Young told the DCNF. “That is why Harris’s price gouging proposals have gotten a cold reception. That is also why her partisans are trying to claim that price gouging bans aren’t really price controls. Which they are, just under a different name.”
The Harris campaign did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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