WATCH: CNN SHREDS Kamala Harris's 'Especially Bad' Price Control Policy - 'Kind Of Thing Tried In...Venezuela, Soviet Union'

On Friday, CNN Economics and Political commentator Catherine Rampell shredded Vice President Kamala Harris's new policy proposal to pursue "corporate price gouging," a move that economists and Republicans have defined as de facto price controls. Rampell explained to CNN's audience that Harris' proposal is the same thing that led to mass food shortages in Venezuela and the Soviet Union.

The Harris campaign explained on Thursday 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 compete with the larger meat-packing corporations, which, Harris argues, have unfairly inflated prices since the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The policy has seen considerable pushback from both the right and the left, with CNN's Catherine Rampell explaining that "No one can explain what price-gouging means. It's like that old line about pornography: 'I know it when I see it.' What does it mean to have an excessive price or an excessive profit margin? That seems to be shorthand for a price or a profit margin that bugs me. That seems too high. It is very hard to pin down what this would actually mean." 

The CNN analyst explained that Democrat legislation in the Senate, led by Sens. Bob Casey (D-PA) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), would serve as an "especially bad" template for a Harris policy. "It bans excessive prices, grossly excessive prices, and grossly excessive profit margins and says that the Federal Trade Commission can use any metric it deems appropriate to decide what that would mean...It's not going to be markets; it's not going to be supply and demand that's determining how much your grocery store is charging you for milk or eggs. It is going to be some bureaucrat in DC."

"We've seen this kind of thing tried in lots of other countries before, Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union, etc. It leads to shortages. It leads to black markets. Plenty of uncertainty. And the way that this bill is written may actually increase prices," she explained.

WATCH:

CNN SHREDS Kamala Harris’ communist price control plan:

"We've seen this kind of thing tried in lots of other countries before, Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union.”
pic.twitter.com/shbbAEvaa5

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 16, 2024

You can follow Sterling on X/Twitter here.