“Her policies are comparable to the most socialist, authoritarian model in the history of the world. Instead of liberating American energy and easing the burden on American people, she will impose price controls like those in Venezuela and Cuba,” Brian Hughes, a senior Trump campaign adviser, told reporters.
Harris’ plan would restore and make permanent the child tax credit, a popular addition to the American Rescue Plan, by increasing it from $2,000 to $3,600. Harris said she would ban price gouging to stop sellers from inflating prices. Harris promised to “end the housing shortage” by building 3 million new homes within four years and would offer tax incentives to first-time homebuilders.
“Price gouging is like pornography. You know it when you see it.”
Columnist Katherine Rampell wrote in The Washington Post that before the plan was announced, no one knew what dumping meant: “That’s what dumping is. As the saying goes about hard-core porn, you know it when you see it,” she wrote.
“It is difficult to overstate how terrible this policy is. This is sweeping government price control in all but name, not just in the food industry but in all industries. Supply and demand no longer dictate prices and profit levels. They are decided by far-away bureaucrats in Washington. The FTC could tell, say, Kroger in Ohio, what a fair price it could charge for milk.”
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said parts of Kamala Harris’ economic plan are good, but the price control proposal is absurd. “My take on VP Harris’ economic plan is that it actually has some good ideas — help for first-time homebuyers, tax credits for parents of newborns, etc. — but the idea that we can control inflation by limiting ‘corporate price gouging’ is absurd. That’s not what causes inflation. It’s the printing of trillions of dollars of money that goes to military spending and corporate giveaways. When you print money and spend it in a way that doesn’t increase our ability to produce goods and services, you get inflation. The problem is that VP Harris (or her team) doesn’t understand basic economics,” Kennedy posted.
