Vice President Kamala Harris will call for a first ever federal ban on food and grocery price gouging as she introduces her economic platform in a speech Friday.
Shifting the blame for persistently high prices on major corporations, Harris’s price gouging ban would set rules that ensure "big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries" and direct the Federal Trade Commission and other agencies to penalize any corporations that violate the rules, according to a Harris campaign press release late Wednesday.
The price control scheme comes in response to growing concerns among voters over the Biden-Harris administration’s dismal economic record that has left consumers with soaring grocery bills. The proposal is the first insight into Harris's economic platform since she emerged as her party’s presumptive nominee more than three weeks ago.
Critics say the radical proposal is a political move to "whitewash" the record of the Biden-Harris administration, from which Harris has struggled to distance herself.
"It seems pretty obvious to me that, despite her insistence to the contrary, Harris is not genuinely interested in 'a federal ban on corporate price gouging on groceries,'" National Review's senior editor Charles Cooke wrote Thursday. "Instead, she’s interested in whitewashing the record of the Biden-Harris administration in which she serves as vice president, and thereby eliminating one of her key liabilities going into the election in November."
According to her plan, Harris would allocate more resources for the federal government to tackle "price-fixing and other anti-competitive practices in the food and grocery industries," while actively propping up small businesses to take on major corporations.
"In her remarks Friday, Vice President Harris will discuss her lifelong commitment to fighting for the middle class and tackling powerful interests by invoking her time as California’s attorney general and going after corporate greed and price gouging—and winning," the release concluded.
Cooke slammed the proposal for artificially bringing prices down instead of focusing on the root causes of inflation.
"The record inflation of the last few years is not the product of 'corporate price gouging,' and even if it were, in some limited and marginal form, an attempt to address that with price controls would fail," Cooke said.
Inflation rates skyrocketed under the Biden-Harris administration, reaching 7 percent in 2021, 6.5 percent in 2022, and 3.4 percent in 2023.
"Kamala Harris can’t hide from her disastrous record of skyrocketing inflation, resulting in a 20 percent increase in prices since she took office," Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said. "Americans are struggling under the Biden-Harris economy, and now she wants to gaslight them into believing her bald-faced lies. She has no shame and ultimately she can’t hide from all the hurt she has caused every American because they feel it every single day."