Posted on 08/15/2024 7:13:23 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
* Vice President Kamala Harris will propose the first-ever federal ban on “corporate price-gouging” in the food industry, her campaign announced.
* Harris will also pledge that if elected, she will direct the Justice Department to increase scrutiny of potential mergers between grocers and food producers.
* The ban is part of a broader effort by the Democratic presidential nominee to respond to voters’ ongoing frustration with the high cost of meat and groceries.
“There’s a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets, and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business,” the Harris campaign said in a statement. “Americans can see that difference in their grocery bills.”
The proposed ban is part of a broader economic policy platform that the Democratic presidential nominee plans to unveil Friday at a campaign rally in battleground North Carolina.
Harris will also pledge that if elected president, she will direct her administration to increase scrutiny of potential mergers between large supermarkets and food producers, “specifically for the risk that the proposed merger would raise grocery prices for consumers,” her campaign said.
This package of regulatory proposals is one of the Harris campaign’s earliest efforts to outline an economic platform that is independent of President Joe Biden’s agenda.
Before Biden abruptly dropped out of the race in July and endorsed Harris, he had spent more than a year campaigning for reelection and blaming corporate greed for consumer prices driven higher by inflation.
Harris’ plan still sits firmly within the overall Biden approach to regulation, however, which has prioritized consumer protections across a range of industries and sued to block several massive corporate mergers.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
CAn you say government price freeze? As Nixon did?
You can bet that Kamala could not pass a high school level economics exam.
Exactly... it'll sound like something great to low-information voters, but it will do nothing since there's no actual problem to fix here. Meanwhile, the media will announce that she's 'solved inflation'.
It’s what grocery stores do when forced to pay mandated minimum wages, twice as much for fuel to keep the shelves stocked, are prohibited from stopping shoplifters, etc.
As Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman correctly predicted, however, Nixon’s gambit ended “in utter failure and the emergence into the open of the suppressed inflation.” The people would pay the price — but not until after he’d coasted to a landslide re-election in 1972 over Democratic Sen. George McGovern.
By the time Nixon reimposed a temporary freeze in June 1973, Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw explain in The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, it was obvious that price controls didn’t work: “Ranchers stopped shipping their cattle to the market, farmers drowned their chickens, and consumers emptied the shelves of supermarkets.”
The Democrats pulling a play from the Nixon playbook. Ironic, isn't it?
But that was then and this is now! They just did not have the right people then. But we have the people that know how to do it correctly. Trust us, we're experts!
“Does she want food shortages? Because that’s how you get food shortages.”
Good point. Also I think they would have no problem with meat shortages.
When government tries to fix things, they end up making things even worse.
But we don’t teach this kind of thing in school so our kids have no clue what this will lead to. So they will cheer the hell out of kamala. She will win in novemeber because the media is 100% behind her. And we will be screwed.......
Those meat hike price rises, like everything else, including the price of oil, are the direct result of government overspending and money-printing that have brought us inflation. Harris proposes to control these prices, as if any business raising prices is “greedy,” cracking down on what the Bolsheviks used to call “hoarders and wreckers.”
But inflation and the interest rate hikes used to control it, hit every aspect of the economy, not just groceries, from rents to housing stock, to medical care, to credit card rates, to consumer goods.
Everything. Inflation, as Milton Friedman has stated, is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
You get rid of inflation the way President Javier Milei of Argentina did, by stopping the government spending.
But Kamala Harris is unlikely to know where Argentina is, let alone learn from its example, and the rest of her economic plan is to spend trillions more on child care.
Kamala’s plan will work about as well as it worked in the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Venezuela. Like shortages? Like long lines? Like bread lines where the bread runs out? Like ration cards? This is the way you get those shortages.
The only gouging is our oppressive tax regime.
[[ “soaring meat prices have accounted for a large part of Americans’ higher grocery bills]]
Yeah right- extremely high transportation costs and unreasonable business requirements/rules are the reason!
I thought they said grocery prices have only gone up 3%.
Problem with her nut brain thinking is the farmer has to pay out the nose for workers’ wages so the price has already skyrocketed. Is she going to put wages back down at pre-covid?
She also wants a higher minimum wage & corp taxes to be raised to 35%
Funny how the grocery stores weren’t price gouging when Trump was President.
ROFLOL. SHE HELPED CAUSE IT.
In a Kamala Harris administration are supposed to refer to each other as comrade? I know there’s already a KGB like organization now, but when will the gulags be built? Oh, and are we supposed to have a photo in our living room of ‘Dear Leader’? So much to look forward to in the new communist utopia….
Ah yes price controls, they worked so well for Jimmy Carter, welcome back to the 70’s. Coming soon, even / odd license plates on even odd / days for when you will be allowed to buy a rationed amount of gas. She cheats in we are so screwed.
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