Obama Economist Slams Kamala’s Socialist Price Controls

(Congress Report) – A Harvard economist who previously worked for the Obama administration ripped into Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, over her price control plan which she wants to utilize to bring down inflation, saying it was not based in “reality.” I think anyone who has even a fundamental grasp of economics knows that price controls are socialism and have been used in just about every nation that has ever attempted to implement socialist ideals in practice, only to cause massive problems.

“This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” Jason Furman remarked to The New York Times in a report that came out last Friday. “There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”

Harris revealed her price control strategy last Wednesday, saying she would put in place a federal price-fixing plan for corporations, if she should defeat former President Donald Trump in November, in order to prevent “big corporations” from taking advantage of consumers, according to Fox News.

“There’s a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business,” the Harris campaign went on to say in a statement. “Americans can see that difference in their grocery bills.”

“The proposal would give authority to the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to impose harsh penalties on companies for setting excessively high prices. However, some economists and financial experts have cast doubt on Harris’ plan, arguing that corporations don’t play a huge role in rising grocery prices,” Fox noted.

Furman, who once served as chairman for the National Economic Council under former President Barack Obama, spoke with the Times and stated that policies like those being proposed by Harris are fraught with risk due to discouraging new businesses from coming into the market in order to meet demand from consumers. Of course, economists who are more interested in pushing the progressive agenda than actually helping people disagreed with Furman and heaped a bunch of praise on Harris and her proposal.

“Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, argued Harris’ efforts to curb what she calls price gouging could help keep businesses accountable to consumers. Weber told the Times that people may feel taken advantage of if corporations are thriving while ‘ordinary people’ are enduring financial hardships,” the article read.

“Some sort of basic social contract is kind of crumpling,” she declared.

Harris will give a broader explanation of her economic plans for the country during her first formal speech as the nominee at a campaign event scheduled to be held in Raleigh, North Carolina on Friday.

Personal finance expert Dave Ramsey slammed the policy, along with Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell.

“We tried it” in the 1970s, Ramsey said in comments delivered during Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s program on Thursday. “There was a whole movement for price controls across everything, because inflation was out of control and rampant, just like it is now. And so it’s been tried. It does not work. What works is to flood the market with supply.”

“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is,” Rampell opined in an op-ed published on Thursday. “It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. 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.”

Copyright 2024. CongressReport.com