Vice President Kamala Harris admitted that "very few" companies engage in price gouging, undercutting her own claim that "corporate price gouging" is to blame for skyrocketing grocery prices.
"[Corporations] jack up prices to make it more difficult for desperate people to just get by. We need to take that on," Harris said on Wednesday. Yet, Harris continued, "it’s very few of them that do this."
Harris's remarks, made during a speech at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute's 47th Annual Leadership Conference, undermine a key part of her own economic plan. Harris blames the high inflation rates under the Biden-Harris administration on major corporations engaging in price gouging and promotes what critics call "Soviet-style" price controls on food and groceries.
The radical proposal, unveiled last month, has drawn significant backlash from economists and food industry experts.
"This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality," said Jason Furman, a Harvard economics professor and former Obama administration economist. "There’s no upside here, and there is some downside."
Bob Unanue, CEO of the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the United States, said Harris’s economic plan would put the "last nails in the coffin of this economy and this country" and that the Biden-Harris administration "started a war" against the American middle class from day one.
"People are voting with their stomachs," Republican nominee Donald Trump said of grocery prices, which Labor Department data show were still nearly 30 percent higher in July than in 2019. Harris’s price controls on food would lead to "rationing, hunger, and skyrocketing prices," the former president added.