“Her policies rival some of the most socialist and authoritarian models from world history.Instead of unleashing American energy and reducing the burden on our people, she would impose price controls that are something out of Venezuela or Cuba,” senior Trump campaign adviser Brian Hughes told reporters.
Harris’ plan would restore the American Rescue Plan’s popular expansion of the child tax credit to as much as $3,600, up from $2,000, and call for it to be made permanent. She said she would ban price grouging which is stopping sellers from inflating the prices. Harris promised to work toward construction of three million new homes to “end the housing shortage” within a four-year time frame, offering a first-ever tax incentive to people building starter homes.
‘Price grouging is like pornography. You know it when you see it’
Columnist Catherine Rampell wrote in Washington Post that — before the unveiling of the plan — no one knows what price grouging means. “That’s the thing about price gouging: As has been said of hardcore pornography, you know it when you see it,” she wrote.
“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.”
Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy (Jr) said Kamala Harris economy plan is partly good but the price control proposal is absurd. “My take on VP Harris’s economic plan: it actually has some good ideas — help for first-time homebuyers, tax credit for parents of newborns. But the notion that you can control inflation by limiting “corporate price-gouging” is absurd. That isn’t the cause of inflation. It is the printing of trillions of dollars that go toward military spending and corporate giveaways. When you print money and spend it in ways that don’t increase productive capacity for goods and services, you will get inflation. That VP Harris (or her team) does not understand basic economics is troubling,” Kennedy posted.
Source : Times of India