We still don't know very much about what Kamala Harris plans to do to deal with the various crises facing the nation if she is somehow elected to be the next president. (*Shudder*) That's because she is still yet to do a formal interview or hold a press conference and take serious questions. But she did seem to lift the curtain just a bit yesterday while addressing a small assembly of supporters in North Carolina. Harris acknowledged that "prices are still too high," leading me to wonder who tipped her off to that. She pointed to the cost of a loaf of bread and a pound of hamburger at the grocery store. Unfortunately, she still seemed to be trying to blame all of this on the pandemic and made no mention of the massive spikes in inflation observed while she and Joe Biden have been in office. (NY Post)

Vice President Kamala Harris admitted to a small group of supporters Friday that the cost of food has been “too high” under President Biden.

“We all know that prices went up during the pandemic when the supply chains shut down and failed, but our supply chains have now improved and prices are still too high,” the Democratic presidential nominee, 59, said during a campaign stop in Raleigh, NC, in a speech outlining her new economic plan. 

“A loaf of bread costs 50% more today than it did before the pandemic,” Harris continued, validating one of former President Donald Trump’s central campaign messaging points, which is that the economy was in far better shape during his presidency.

To give a small amount of credit where due, disruptions in the domestic supply chain during the pandemic did contribute to some price increases at that time. But those issues are now almost entirely resolved. During the early post-pandemic period when the supply chain was grinding back into gear, inflation was still on its way upward toward the peak of more than 9% seen during the Biden administration. 

But Harris didn't want to talk about that. She instead pivoted back to Biden's talking point about "bad actors,” such as “big food companies,” which she accused of “seeing their highest profits in two decades." (I knew about Big Oil and Big Pharma, but when did we start battling "Big Food?") She also placed the blame on grocery store chains which are supposedly “not passing the savings to consumers." Does she even understand how retail businesses operate?

All of this is part of her "price gouging" claim that she's been going on about for some time now. 

Vice President Kamala Harris plans to propose the first-ever federal ban on "corporate price-gouging in the food and grocery industries," her campaign announced late Wednesday.

"There's a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets, and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business," the Harris campaign said in a statement. "Americans can see that difference in their grocery bills."

Harris's plan to impose a ban on supposed price-gouging has been widely panned, including in left-wing media outlets. That's simply code language for government price controls. Even the Washington Post Editorial Board slammed her pitch as a collection of "gimmicks." And they are dangerous gimmicks indeed. As other analysts have noted, we have seen attempts by governments to forcibly control prices via regulations, most notably in countries like Venezuela. The results are uniformly bad, resulting in scarcity and the emergence of black markets. Doing the same thing in the United States and expecting any sort of different outcome would be madness. Both Harris and Biden need to take ownership of the staggering inflation that was caused by flooding the country with massive shipments of fake money we didn't have. When that supply of cash finally burns out, if the spending is reined in, things will begin to return to normal, but not before.