There’s “no upside” to Vice President Kamala Harris’ “Soviet-style” plan to federally set grocery prices, which she is due to unveil Friday afternoon at a rally in North Carolina — and it would likely lead to the worst supply shortages since the 1970s, economists told The Post.

The Harris campaign announced Friday that the Democratic presidential nominee would push for “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries” if she is elected in November. She would also deputize the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to launch investigations into any companies that flout the centrally planned pricing diktats.

The policy proposals are not only “extraordinarily vague” and addressing an “economic non-problem” — but also appear to be “straight out of a five-year plan” of a Chairman Mao or Joseph Stalin-like figure, economists told The Post.

“Who exactly is going to decide what a fair price is for eggs or bread or cereal?” asked Brian Riedl, a senior economic fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “Is the federal government going to come up with a Soviet-style menu of what grocery stores can charge without being punished by the state?”

The plan resembles a bill introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), one of whose aides recently joined the Harris campaign, that first floated the price-gouging crackdown.

“Everyone who lived through or studied the 1970s knows price controls are disastrous because they lead to shortages,” Riedl told The Post. “Demand far outstrips supply. … This is why you had gas lines.”

While the price controls could in the short term be “moderately disinflationary,” Riedl added, Harris’ other policies, such as shelling out $25,000 in down payments for any first-time home buyers, would be “absolutely inflationary.”

Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, told The Post the plan to fix grocery prices and subsidize housing in the first 100 days of a Harris presidency also made little sense since the US is “clearly past the peak inflationary period.”

“Grocery prices haven’t budged since January 2023. Housing prices have increased, but they’re back to their pre-pandemic trend line,” Lincicome said, adding that there was “not really any indication out there of price gouging.”

“If you look at the data, especially on the food side, you’re not talking about an industry that is reaping windfall profits,” he added.

“Grocery stores make very small profits, the markups are tiny,” Riedl concurred.

Jason Furman, a Harvard University economist who chaired President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told the New York Times that prices had stabilized and any further controls were “not a sensible policy.”

“I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” Furman said. “There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”

Further, the proposals wouldn’t come close to addressing the roughly 20% cumulative inflation rate since Harris assumed office in January 2021, even as she and running mate Tim Walz claim their administration would cut costs and “keep inflation in check.”

Nor have studies by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and other financial institutions found a strong correlation between the alleged price gouging and inflation.

“Consumers want outright deflation, and the reality is we’re not going back to that,” Lincicome added, noting that the current rate was “a clear combination of a fiscal and monetary policy hitting a constrained monetary environment” after former President Donald Trump and President Biden “signed into law trillions and trillions of dollars of new spending.”

Furman had warned in 2022 that much of that spending — as well as expensive new Biden proposals to unilaterally cancel up to half a trillion dollars in student debt — was “reckless” and akin to “pouring gasoline” on an “inflationary fire that is already burning.”

But economists’ fears about the inflationary aspects of out-of-control spending have had little effect on the American public or politicians’ messaging, surveys first reported by Politico show, with nearly three-quarters of battleground state voters embracing rent price controls.

Only 2% of economists believe rent caps “would make middle-income Americans substantially better off over the next 10 years,” according to a University of Chicago Booth School of Business poll in July.

Still, it’s part of a style-over-substance approach that the Harris campaign has been using since she replaced Biden at the top of the 2024 Democratic ticket, with other critical swing-state polls showing her ahead of Trump.

“This is politics,” Riedl noted. “The Harris campaign is vulnerable on inflation because the Biden-Harris administration worsened inflation with spending deficits and tariffs — and this initiative is entirely an [effort] to deflect their blame and instead blame greedy price-gouging corporations.”

“This is pandering to populists who just want low prices and free stuff, but don’t remember basic high school economics,” he said. “And they don’t remember the 1970s.”

Both the Harris campaign and the FTC declined to comment on this story.