Longtime political strategist and former Biden White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain threw cold water on Vice President Harris’ price-fixing plan during a recent appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
After weeks of refusal to release specific policy plans, Harris announced a plan that would allow the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general to impose hefty fines on grocers and suppliers whose prices are deemed to be too high. The Biden-Harris Administration has long blamed the nation’s inflation woes on “corporate price gouging.”
Harris’ plan has been compared to the policies of communist planned economies such as Venezuela and the Soviet Union and has been met with opposition from both sides of the political aisle, including Klain.
“Well, inflation came from a lot of places. And I think having a federal price gouging law was not going to solve inflation. But consumers deserve not to be gouged. That’s just fair,” he said during a recent appearance on “Squawk Box.”
“But where’s the evidence of gouging, Ron? When supply goes down, demand goes up — we’ve seen this movie before. I was around for Nixon’s price controls,” co-host Joe Kernen then pushed back. “It’s the worst thing you can do. If you artificially control a price and keep it low, then competitors don’t come in to increase the supply and it just exacerbates the situation.”
Klain responded by claiming that former President Trump’s economic plans would be worse for the country. “But I agree, I think what we really need to do is to further smooth out supply chains…fix the supply chain problems we did in the Biden-Harris administration with improving the efficiency of our western ports to make them operate more efficiently and get goods into our country more quickly and avoid things like the freight rail strike that President Biden prevented,” he said.
“And so, I think you’re going to see an administration devoted to bringing down costs and also putting a little more money in middle-class families’ pockets.”
Klain is far from the only prominent Democrat to distance himself from Harris’ price-fixing plan. Harvard economist and former Obama advisor Jason Furman told the New York Times that Harris’ policies are “not sensible.”
“This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” he said. “There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”
