In her first policy speech as the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris officially proposed her economic plan to address the high cost of living but failed to offer additional details on what economists have called her “Soviet” price control scheme.
During the North Carolina rally, Harris said her price gouging plan—a phrase she mispronounced as “price gaging”—would pose “new penalties” for companies that “exploit crises and break the rules” and support “smaller food businesses that are trying to play by the rules and get ahead.” But Harris failed to address the concerns of top economists who slammed the proposal, first introduced on Wednesday, for being bad communist policy.
“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is,” the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell wrote in a scathing op-ed Friday morning. “Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would.”
“We’ve seen this kind of thing tried in lots of other countries before,” Rampell said in a CNN appearance following her editorial. “Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union, etc. It leads to shortages. It leads to black markets.”
During her 35-minute speech, Harris compared her price control to her record as a California prosecutor, saying she “went