After months of running the most nonsubstantive plan, entirely devoid of discussions, press conferences, and plan proposals—but loaded with flip-flops—Kamala Harris has suddenly started to show some policies to the American people. It’s certainly going well.
Advertisement
The first policy she dropped was Donald Trump’s” No Tax on Tips” plan, and even the media could n’t ignore the fact she’d plagiarized that idea from him. Her most recent attempt to create something original did n’t go much better. In fact, it’s already starting to look like a train wreck, and she has n’t even officially unveiled it yet.
The proposal, of course, is Soviet-style cost handles branded as a national ban on price-gouging. By focusing on business greed rather than the Biden-Harris administration’s economic policies, the plan aims to remove two animals with one stone while persuading the people that she has the solution to fix it.  ,
However, the proposal is so horrifyingly poor that Catherine Rampell, a columnist for the Washington Post, totally destroyed it on Thursday night.
Rampell, a progressive, pulls no blows in her part. She claims that Kamala Harris’s price-gouging plan is “hard to magnify how terrible it is.”
” The most likely template for Harris’s proposal is a recent bill from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass. ). ( Harris co-sponsored similar legislation with Warren in 2020, when Harris was a legislator. )”, Rampell writes. ” Warren’s bill may ban any’ greatly excessive price ‘ during any’ unusual disruption’ of a market”.
Advertisement
” Alas, no explanation was provided for these phrases, either, instead, the bill would enable the Federal Trade Commission to maintain prohibitions using any parameter it deems appropriate”, she continues.
It’s difficult to overstate how terrible this plan is. It is, in all but name, a broad set of government-enforced price controls across every business, not only food. Prices and income levels may no longer be based on supply and demand. Far-off Washington officials do. The FTC would be able to determine the appropriate milk cost at, let’s say, a Kroger in Ohio.
At best, this may lead to scarcity, dark areas and stockpiling, among other distortions seen preceding times countries tried to limit price rise by stablecoins. ( There’s a reason narrower “price gouging” laws that exist in some U. S. states are rarely invoked. ) At worst, it may accidentally , increase rates.  ,
That’s that, among other things, the policy would ban companies from offering lower rates to a major client such as Costco than to Joe’s Corner Store, which means quantity deals are in trouble. Worse, it would require public companies to publish detailed internal data about costs, margins, contracts and their future pricing strategies. The government’s facilitation of cost and pricing plans allows businesses to coerce to keep prices higher.
Advertisement
Rampbell firmly believes that Trump will benefit from this terrible proposal from Kamala. ” If your opponent claims you’re a’ communist,’ maybe do n’t start with an economic agenda that can ( accurately ) be labeled as federal price controls”.
And that’s why Kamala Harris has been keeping her distance from the American people and the media.
