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Ex-Obama admin economist sounds the alarm on Harris policy proposal: ‘There’s no upside here’

August 17, 2024 | | Print Article

Former Obama administration economist Jason Furman is raising the alarm about Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ communist price control scheme.

While speaking at a campaign event in North Carolina this Friday, Harris touted a blatantly communist agenda that calls for imposing price controls on food manufacturers and inflicting further taxes on the American people:

Speaking with The New York Times about this agenda, Furman excoriated the vice president’s plans.

“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.”

There are, in fact, LOTS of downsides.

“Price controls have been disastrous whenever they’ve been implemented,” according to Reason magazine. “Prices are signals, ways of communicating how much of a good is needed by consumers and how much ought to be produced. Interfering with these signals will create terrible shortages.”

‘”Giving the government the power to meddle in the economy in this way will not drive prices down, it will force some firms to go out of business and some consumers to experience shortages of goods they would have otherwise been able to purchase. The scale at which this devastation happens is contingent on the scale at which the government chooses to meddle,” the magazine notes.

Harris’s proposal has also faced criticism from financial expert Dave Ramsey.

“It’s not sustainable because it’s artificial,” he told Fox News. “If you just put a lid on something and if you want to explore what really happens, just go back to the 1970s. We tried it. There was a whole movement for price controls across everything, because inflation was out of control and rampant, just like it is now. And so it’s been tried. It does not work.”

“What works is to flood the market with supply. Lots of oil means lower oil prices. Lots of labor means lower labor prices, lots of whatever means lower prices. It’s a simple supply and demand curve. It’s called economics, and it’s called free market economics. When you insert government in it and try to artificially cramp it down, it simply does not work, because you can only hold that hose for so long until the pressure builds up, and then it blows on you,” he added.

Indeed, former Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford’s price controls in the 1970s were a complete and utter failure.

“The era of price controls is most remembered for long lines at gas stations,” The Washington Times notes. “The controls were put in place by the Nixon and Ford administrations in reaction to a jump in fuel prices caused by cuts in production by the newly formed international oil cartel, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.”

“The price controls resulted in a fuel-rationing system that made available about 5 percent less oil than was consumed before the controls. Consumers scrambled and sat in lines to ensure they weren’t left without. Gas stations found they only had to stay open a few hours a day to empty out their tanks. Because they could not raise prices, they closed down after selling out their gas to hold down their labor and operating costs.”

Even a columnist at The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, has bashed Harris’ plan.

“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is,” she wrote in a column this week. “It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.”

Vivek Saxena
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