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On Friday, Kamala Harris made her first statements about her own policy plans and ideology since a month ago when the Democrat party elites tossed the mentally declining Joe Biden under the bus and hand-picked Harris as his replacement in this year’s presidential race.
It took, literally, no time at all before her ideas were condemned as “socialist” or “communist,” by not just GOP presidential nominee President Donald Trump but economic experts, too.
Trump’s campaign cited the analysis of a commentator from the leftist CNN, Catherine Rampell, who pointed out Harris’s plans already have been tried in other locations.
“We’ve seen this kind of thing tried in lots of other countries before, Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union. It leads to shortages. It leads to black markets, plenty of uncertainty.”
Harris, as reported earlier, is opposed to “price gouging,” by those involved in distributing and selling America’s food supply. And she wants “price controls,” a routine technic used by repressive governments to make their economies look better.
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
Rampell explained, “Well, first of all, nobody can explain what price gouging means. It’s like that old line about pornography: I know it when I see it, in the sense that, 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.
“So, you know, it’s very hard to pin down what this would actually mean. If you look at the legislation that, as I mentioned, is already in the Senate, led by Senator Warren and Senator Bob Casey and a slew of others. The particular way that this is written, which is likely to be the template for any proposal that Harris would eventually embrace, is especially bad in that it just bans ‘excessive prices, grossly excessive prices, grossly excessive profit margins,’ and says that the Federal Trade Commission can use any metric it deems appropriate to decide what that would mean.”
She noted that, basically, means “some bureaucrat in D.C.” will be deciding grocery prices, not supply and demand.
She continued, “Which seems totally unworkable, first of all, for the FTC to be deciding how much Kroger charges for eggs in Michigan. But it also would be very bad for markets. … And beyond that, the specific way this bill is written might actually increase prices because of some of the other language in it, things like requiring companies, public companies, to disclose in their quarterly reports, the quarterly earnings reports, how they’re setting prices, which is a great way to help them collude, which normally we don’t want them to do.”
A report as Fox Business explained Harris also has a “list of actions” to address affordable housing, including providing $25,000 down payments for first-time homebuyers.
The report said, “Alexander Gorlin, an architect who co-authored the book ‘Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture, and the Future of Affordable Housing’ told FOX Business he likes the idea, but he and co-author Victoria Newhouse both said they would need to see more about the plan, noting that $25,000 might be great assistance in some areas of the country, but would not go very far in places with higher home prices, like San Francisco.”
And Tony Fiorillo, owner of Asset Management Strategies, Inc., told FOX Business that Harris’s ideas are “a perfect formula to create inflation.”
“Providing this benefit from the government would increase demand for houses at a time when there is already a shortage of homes available for sale,” he explained.
Elon Musk, in the Fox report, said yes, on social media, when the question was asked, “[W]on’t that just increase the price of all homes by $25,000 while also increasing the deficit.”
Wealth adviser Cody Moore of Alpharetta, Georgia, said, “In my opinion, it is just an attempt to garner more votes for the upcoming election by utilizing handouts.”
Biden, while he was campaigning, multiple times promised to “cancel” the debt of student loan borrowers, in an obvious attempt to purchase goodwill.
The Supreme Court at one point said he couldn’t do what he wanted, and the facts are that Biden wasn’t “cancelling” any debt, he was just forcing taxpayers to pay it instead of those who borrowed and spent the money.
Another report at Fox explained that her policies “may be even worse than Biden’s failed ‘Bidenomics.'”
Those are the policies and practices that have imposed on American consumers inflation of well over 20% since Biden took office.
The Harris campaign claims it will stop “big corporations” from taking advantage if it is allowed to impose a federal ban “on price gouging on food and groceries.’
The Daily Caller News Foundation noted even Jason Furman, Barack Obama’s top economist, was critical.
“The good case scenario is price gouging is a message, not a reality, and the bad case scenario is that this is a real proposal. You’ll end up with bigger shortages, less supply and ultimately risk higher prices and worse outcomes for consumers if you try to enforce this in a real way, which I don’t know if they would or wouldn’t do.”
A report from the Federal Reserve of San Francisco release weeks ago, and apparently ignored by Harris, confirmed that “corporate greed” is not the main driver of inflation.
“This is economic lunacy. Price controls are a SERIOUSLY bad idea,” Samuel Gregg, of the American Institute for Economic Research, said on X. “They lead to shortages, severe misallocations of capital, and distort the ability to prices to signal the information we all need to make choices.”
Another foundation report said former Trump administration official Kevin Hassett blasted Harris’s ideas as “absolute socialism.”
“For an economist, this is about the most terrifying proposal I’ve ever seen. Because What Kamala Harris is saying is that the government needs to set the price of things and she’s starting with food, but I guess if they set the price of food, they might as well set the price of everything else.
“They’ve also come out, you might recall, the Biden administration saying that they want to set rents, they think rents are too high, so they’re going to have the government decide what the rent for your apartment should be. This is absolute socialism and it never ends well. If you go back and look at countries that have tried this, like Cuba, Venezuela, Ukraine back when the Soviet Union organized it, then it leads to famine and shortages.”
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