Fox Business host Larry Kudlow said Friday evening that “no one knows” what Vice President Kamala Harris meant when she blamed “price gouging” for inflation during her speech outlining her economic plans if elected in November.
Kudlow appeared on “Special Report With Bret Baier” after Harris’ speech in which she outlined her economic plans if she were to be elected president, including a proposal for a federal ban on “corporate price gouging” in food and grocery stores. Kudlow criticized the idea, noting that it not only confused people but that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has previously tried the same approach to address alleged price gouging and lost all their cases over the past three and a half years.
“Look, this is price controls by any other name. I mean, it’s like a sheep in sheep’s clothing. It’s price controls because it’s price controls,” Kudlow said. “We know how bad that turned out for Nixon. Price controls never worked in Russia, Soviet Union, Venezuela, Cuba. They never worked. They cause shortages. They cause black markets, and eventually they cause higher prices because the controls are lifted because people are yelling about shortages. But no one really knows what she means by price gouging. There’s no definition.”
“There is a lot of blah, blah, blah in their announcement about rules and the Federal Trade Commission — well, the Federal Trade Commission has tried a bunch of cases about price gouging or so-called corporate greed, and they’ve lost them all over the past three and a half years.
Kudlow continued to point out how corporate margins for grocery stores were low, questioning why Harris had not slammed companies like Apple and Microsoft for “making too much money” since their margins are much higher.
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“One more thing. Ms. Harris yelling about beef producers, I guess, and poultry producers, and grocery stores, so I looked at their corporate margins. Are they making any money? I mean, if they are gouging somebody, Bret, they must be enormously profitable, and they are not,” Kudlow continued. “The grocery stores’ profit margins: 1.2%. Meat, beef and poultry: 4.7%. All of American business, 8.5%. Look, if she wants to go after somebody for making too much money, here’s what Apple: 26%, Microsoft: 36%, NVIDIA: 53%. You see where I’m going on this? There’s no case to be made, no one knows what it is. But it’s bad, if it ever worked it would be bad.”
Questions regarding Harris’ plan for her economic stances began to erupt following her speech as she touched on tackling high costs, easing housing shortages and attempting to lower taxes for some Americans. Prior to the event, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell had criticized the vice president’s plan in an op-ed piece for the outlet, calling out Harris’ focus on price gouging.
“Nobody can explain what price gouging means. It’s like that old line about pornography, ‘I know it when I see it,’ in the sense that what does it mean to have an excessive price or an excessive profit margin? That seems to be shorthand for ‘A price or profit margin that bugs me,’ that seems too high,” Rampell said Friday on CNN.
