Kamala Harris Backs Price Controls That Would Lead to Food Shortages

In the 1970s, Kamala Harris’s father, a Marxist economist, advised Jamaica’s government to adopt price controls for food. The result was food shortages and people waiting in long lines for scarce food.

Kamala Harris is now backing price caps for food and groceries in the U.S., which could have the same harmful effect. She’s doing it as a way of deflecting blame for rising inflation under President Biden, which drove up grocery prices. As journalist Guy Benson notes, Harris “cast tie-breaking votes for the inflationary Biden-Harris agenda — and advocated for trillions in *additional* spending. She owns all of it, and then some.”

Grocery prices went up due to inflation under Joe Biden, not greedy grocery stores. Grocery stores’ profit is so small that even if they made no profit at all, grocery prices would fall by only a little over 1%. As economist Scott Lincicome explains, “the American grocery industry….had a 1.18% net profit margin last year.” But the Biden-Harris administration views grocery price increases as the product of greed.  As NBC notes, Biden has “spent more than a year … blaming corporate greed for consumer prices driven higher by inflation.” On Friday, Harris will “propose the first-ever federal ban on ‘corporate price-gouging in the food and grocery industries.'”

Given grocery stores’ tiny profit margin, they aren’t engaged in “price-gouging”, except in the misleading way Democrats define the term, which can mean just raising prices to keep up with inflation (an “anti-rent gouging” bill proposed by Virginia Democrats, 2024 HB 721, would limit rent increases to the inflation rate or a lesser rate prescribed by officials if inflation exceeded 7 percent). Grocery prices rose 0.7% less than the general inflation rate over the past year.