Amid GOP freakout, expert says Harris is 'exactly right' to target price gouging

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
August 19, 2024 

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the National Baptist Convention on September 08, 2022 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

The executive director of a leading progressive think tank said in an appearance on CNBC Monday that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is "exactly right" to target corporate price gouging as part of her broader economic agenda, countering a flurry of bad-faith attacks on the proposal from economists, pundits, Republican lawmakers, and GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.

"This is not price controls," Lindsay Owens of the Groundwork Collaborative said of Harris' proposed crackdown on food and grocery corporations that exploit emergencies such as the coronavirus pandemic to jack up prices.

Owens stressed that some 40 U.S. states—including Republican-dominated Texas—have laws in place to prevent corporate price gouging in times of crisis and pointed out that Trump, who described Harris' plan as "full communist," used the Defense Production Act (DPA) in an effort to prevent the price gouging of medical supplies during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The American Bar Association noted that the Trump administration turned to the DPA "due to the lack of comprehensive federal legislation addressing price gouging."

Owens went on to observe that a federal jury recently found Cal-Maine Foods, Inc. and other major egg suppliers guilty of conspiring to limit egg supply in the U.S. in order to keep prices elevated. Cal-Maine came under fire last year for posting a massive profit surge that the company blamed on disruptions caused by a bird flu outbreak.

"So this is a common-sense set of policies," Owens said of Harris' proposed federal ban on price gouging in the grocery and food sectors. "We need a new ban at the federal level on the books."
Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, applauded Owens for "citing actual evidence of price gouging by egg producers, including that they were culling their flocks during a shortage to hike prices."

"Imagine that, evidence!" Stoller wrote on social media.

Owens' remarks came after CNBC anchor Joe Kernen and Stephen Moore, an economic adviser to Trump and a senior visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation—the far-right group spearheading Project 2025—spent several minutes attacking Harris' proposed federal price gouging ban as a violation of "Economics 101" and a "real assault on the whole free enterprise system."

Such assessments are characteristic of much of the response Harris' plan has received from talking heads, newspaper columnists and editorial boards, GOP lawmakers, and establishment economists. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), whose home state has an anti-price-gouging law on the books, claimed Harris' plan would result in "bread lines."

And while The Washington Post's editorial board and other critics of Harris' plan simply asserted that "'price gouging' is not causing inflation," recent survey data shows that U.S. voters blame large corporations for "taking advantage of inflation" to drive up prices—a view bolstered by research.

A Groundwork report released earlier this year estimated that corporate profits drove more than half of U.S. inflation between April and September 2023.

On top of proposing the first-ever federal ban on price gouging in the food and grocery sectors, Harris is calling for "clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can't unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive profits on food and groceries" as well as "new authority" for the Federal Trade Commission "and state attorneys general to investigate and impose strict new penalties on companies that break the rules."

"As president, I will go after the bad actors," Harris said during a Friday rally in Raleigh, North Carolina. "My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules, and we will support smaller food businesses that are trying to play by the rules and get ahead."