'Going Full Maduro': Vice President Kamala Harris To Propose Federal Ban On 'Corporate Price Gouging' To Lower Grocery Prices

After Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump laid out his economic vision in a speech in North Carolina on Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to announce her own economic agenda that will include the first-ever federal ban on price gouging, a move that critics have condemned as de facto price controls.

The Harris campaign explained that taking on high grocery prices, created by the trillions of dollars of spending passed during the Biden-Harris administration, will be a major priority in Harris' first 100 days as president. The campaign emphasized that the proposal is "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."

The Harris team pointed to the meat-packing companies as one segment of the food industry that is particularly consolidated, arguing that "the lack of competition gives these middlemen the power to drive down earnings for farmers while driving up prices for consumers." The vice president's proposal comes as she struggles to convince voters that she can be trusted to steer the economy in the right direction and attempts to distance herself from President Biden's economic record. The Democrat's policy team reportedly will lay out an initiative to help small businesses to compete with the larger meat-packing corporations which, Harris argues, have unfairly inflated prices since the COVID-19 Pandemic.

In response to the Harris proposal, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung stated, "Kamala Harris can't hide from her disastrous record of skyrocketing inflation, resulting in a 20 percent increase in prices since she took office. 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."

Critics of Harris' proposals have described the effort to halt grocery price increases by stopping "price gouging" as a promise to institute price controls on the American economy. "Harris going full Maduro today. After destroying our currency she isn't proposing government price controls — which will lead to shortages, rationing and of course much more inflation," former Trump advisor Stephen Miller wrote about the proposal.

"Price controls are terrible policy, but their purpose here is political not economic. Harris is trying to rewrite the history of the Biden-Harris years, and to charge that anyone who opposes her idea on the merits wants to keep prices high," National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke wrote. "It's grotesque."

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