After weeks of Republicans and others complaining that she has failed to say what she would do as president, tomorrow, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris will propose what her campaign is calling "the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries—setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can't unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries." It appears to be a major economic policy announcement and one directly aimed at solving what many voters say is their number one issue: inflation.
But a more accurate way of describing Harris’s proposed “ban on price gouging” is “price controls,” and their record in reducing inflation is awful. President Richard Nixon imposed them in the 1970s, which brought down prices immediately, but as soon as they were lifted, prices rose again. The fundamental driver of price inflation is too little supply, and so reducing prices ultimately has to be achieved by increasing supply.
