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Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to unveil her economic plan in a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday. Early indications are that the plan will have a progressive, populist bent and will attack corporate “price gouging,” but conservative critics say this is a smokescreen to deflect attention from the Biden-Harris administration’s fight against inflation.
“People can expect Harris to talk about ways to move the economy forward and lower costs for middle-class families,” Michael Tyler, communications director for the Harris-Waltz campaign, said on CNN’s “Newsroom” on Wednesday, noting that Harris “understands that prices are too high for many families.” The campaign also asserted this week that fighting inflation will be a priority “on day one.”
But conservatives have criticized Harris for claiming to be working on tackling inflation from her first day in office, arguing she had four years to do so.
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“Your first day in office was three and a half years ago. What have you done to combat inflation in that time?” EJ Antoni said. “You’ve created inflation.”
Similar remarks were echoed by former President Trump, who visited North Carolina on Wednesday.
“I gave Harris and Biden an economic miracle, but they quickly turned it into an economic nightmare,” the former president said.
Ahead of Harris’s first formal policy speech of the presidential campaign on Friday, her team unveiled plans to seek the first federal regulation of corporate “price gouging” of food and household goods. The proposal would give the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general the power to impose stiff penalties on companies that charge excessively high prices.
Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally in Las Vegas on August 10. (AP/Julia Nickinson)
“There is a big difference between fair pricing in a competitive market and exorbitant pricing that is unrelated to the costs of doing business,” Harris’ campaign said shortly after announcing the policy proposals.
Republican economists have criticized the move, calling it “Marxist” and “an act of madness.”
They also disputed the validity of Harris’s claims that food and grocery providers are artificially inflating prices.
“Consumer price increases have been lower than producer price increases, which means companies are actually inflating their prices,” said Richard Stern, director of the Grover M. Herman Federal Budget Center at the Heritage Foundation.
“If prices are rising faster than the cost of doing business, [the consumer price index] Will rise faster [the producer price index],it’s not.”
Mr. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation noted that when politicians have tried to control prices or wages in the past, “it always ended with the same disastrous result: shortages.”
“In the 1970s there were queues for petrol, and now she’s talking not about regulating fuel prices, but about regulating food prices, which means that instead of queuing for petrol you’ll have queues for bread. This is totally insane, but I don’t think it’s surprising, because [Harris] is a Marxist, and her policies will have exactly the same effect here as Marxist policies have had elsewhere.”
“Food price controls are the Soviet Union’s way of fighting inflation,” said Paul Teller, executive director of Advancing American Freedom, a nonprofit founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. “Price controls are wrong and have never worked on food or drug prices. They are anti-innovation and anti-free market.”
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Meanwhile, critics of Harris’ “price gouging” proposal have questioned why she didn’t release it sooner, given that Democrats control the White House and, in theory, the Senate, giving Harris a runoff vote on the partisan bill.
When Fox News Digital reached out to Harris’ campaign for comment on the new “price gouging” proposal, which is set to be formally introduced on Friday during her visit to North Carolina, they pointed us to social media threads containing news articles and studies arguing that a lack of competition in the grocery industry and other factors give companies an unfair advantage over consumers.
Another economic policy the Harris campaign has embraced in recent weeks is former President Trump’s no-tax-on-tips policy. Tyler said that’s just one part of Harris’ plan because VP Harris “also understands that Donald Trump doesn’t understand that that’s not enough.”
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2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Vice President Doug Emhoff wave as they board Air Force Two at Joint Base Andrew in Maryland on August 6, 2024. (Brendan Smiarowski/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
“That’s why we must raise the federal minimum wage,” Tyler said, highlighting Harris’ second economic proposal so far.
Harris’ economic platform, which she lost in the 2019 presidential election, included a $3 trillion tax reform proposal aimed at raising taxes on the wealthy. As in her current campaign, she wanted to raise the federal minimum wage, provide billions of dollars in tax credits to low-income renters, create a Bernie Sanders-style Medicare for All health care system, and lower bail for criminals.
Americans are feeling the effects of inflation every time they reach for their wallets: The Labor Department said Wednesday that the Consumer Price Index, a broad measure of the cost of everyday items like gasoline, groceries and rent, rose 0.2% in July from the previous month, in line with expectations.
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Prices of some basic food items have risen significantly in recent years. (Fox & Friends First)
Prices were up 2.9% from the same period last year, the lowest inflation rate since March 2021.
Housing costs continued to be the main driver of inflation last month, with rents rising 0.3% last month and 5.1% higher than the same period last year.
Rising rents are a concern because rising housing costs have the most direct and severe impact on household finances.
Food prices rose 0.2% last month and are 2.2% higher than the same period last year. The eating out index rose 0.2%, while grocery prices rose 0.1%.
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The Biden administration was criticized on social media for a post bragging about lowering gasoline prices. (Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Despite those increases, Harris-Waltz spokesman Joseph Costello wrote in a campaign email Wednesday that “inflation is at its lowest level in three years and the economy is doing well.”
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“Donald Trump’s policies will set us back — raising prices for the middle class by $2,500 and plunging our economy into recession while still paying taxes to the same corporations that are jacking up prices for Americans,” Costello said.
Fox Business’ Megan Henney contributed to this report.
