WAPO WALLOPS KAMALA: When Your Opponent Calls You ‘Communist,’ Maybe

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“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad Kamala Harris’s price-gouging proposal is.”

Catherine Rampell over at The Washington Post penned an op-ed this week torching Kamala Harris’ economic plan crackdown on “excessive prices” and “excessive corporate profits” via federal intervention.

From The Washington Post:

So what level counts as “excessive,” you might ask? TBD, but Harris will ban it.

That’s the thing about price gouging: As has been said of hardcore pornography, you know it when you see it.

It’s not hard to figure out where this proposal came from. Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.

In a news release Wednesday, her campaign said the first 100 days of her presidency would include the “first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”

What are these “clear rules of the road” or the thresholds that determine when a price or profit level becomes “excessive”? The memo doesn’t say, and the campaign did not answer questions I sent seeking clarification.

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 senator.) Warren’s bill would ban any “grossly excessive price” during any “atypical disruption” of a market. Alas, no definition was provided for these terms, either; rather, the bill would empower the Federal Trade Commission to enforce bans using any metric it deems appropriate.

Full op-ed over at The Washington Post:

From @crampell: When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls? https://t.co/MvL8aYstCZ

— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) August 16, 2024