Vice President Kamala Harris is set to talk about her economic plan on Friday that will ban price gouging on groceries, drawing parallels to Republican President Richard Nixon’s freeze on prices and wages.
Harris is expected to detail more about her plan to lower grocery prices and everyday costs at a campaign speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday afternoon.
Her campaign claims the proposal will curb corporate exploitation of consumers and include enforcement penalties, directing the Federal Trade Commission to fine food companies that violate the ban.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Thursday night, Harris said, “When I am President, it will be a day one priority to bring down prices. I’ll take on big corporations that engage in illegal price gouging and corporate landlords that unfairly raise rents on working families.”
Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on August 10, 2024, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her price control proposal mirrors an idea of Republican President Nixon.
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Her economic proposal mirrors an idea of Republican President Nixon, who was initially opposed government intervention in the economy and then sought to control wages and prices to combat inflation.
In an official announcement in 1971, Nixon issued the “first peacetime wage-price freeze.” The move was widely regarded as unsuccessful several years after and sustained lasting economic impacts.
Former United States Secretary of Education Bill Bennett criticized Harris’ plan on Fox News yesterday, calling it a “bad idea.” He added, “It’s even bad for Republicans, as you pointed out, Nixon did it, and it was a bad idea then.”
Price controls are generally opposed by capitalists who favor a free market over government intervention, as they set legal limits on the prices of goods.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis wrote in 2022 that “[price] controls have significant costs that increase with their duration and breadth,” adding that “Prices allocate scarce resources. Price controls distort those signals, leading to the inefficient allocation of goods and services.”
President Nixon, in a nationally televised address on August 15, 1973 asks for support against “those who would exploit Watergate in order to keep us from doing what we were elected to do.”
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Harris’s proposal has received criticism from prominent Republicans, who have labeled it as “communist” and argued that it will not help the economy.
Donald Trump’s campaign released a statement today saying Venezuela’s disputed communist president, Nicolas Maduro—who the U.S. does not recognize as the official winner of the country’s July presidential elections and under whose rule Venezuela has experienced an economic and humanitarian crisis, leading to 7.7 million Venezuelans fleeing the country, according to the United Nations—”would be proud of Comrade Kamala” for her price controls proposal.
The email statement, with the subject line “Comrade Kamala Goes Full Communist” continued, “It’s hard to overstate how disastrous of an idea it is to let D.C. bureaucrats dictate the price of groceries in cities, suburbs, and rural communities across the country — dismantling necessary supply-and-demand signals of the free market and ultimately leading to higher prices for consumers.”
Newsweek reached out to Harris’ campaign for comment via email on Friday.
Trump’s campaign, as well as other Republican policymakers and commentators, said that the current state of the economy is a result of President Joe Biden and Harris’ economic policies, writing, “The disastrous economic policies of Harris and Biden created the inflation problem — aided and abetted by Harris’s tiebreaking votes on trillions in inflationary spending.”
