News/Commentary

VP’s policies inspire mockery: ‘If you want to recreate the happy economic conditions of The Walking Dead…’

August 17, 2024 | | Print Article

A CNN commentator excoriated presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Friday over the economic policies speech she delivered in North Carolina.

As previously reported, while speaking at a campaign event in North Carolina, Harris touted a blatantly communist agenda that calls for imposing price controls on food manufacturers and inflicting further taxes on the American people.

Addressing the speech later Friday afternoon on CNN, the network’s lone conservative commentator, Scott Jennings, tore into every part of it, including Harris’ claim that price controls are needed because prices remain so persistently high.

Jennings noted, for instance, that her admission that prices remain so high is “a searing indictment” of … her and President Joe Biden’s administration.

Listen:

“She was very effective at laying out just how hard hit the American people have been by the policies of the Biden-Harris agenda,” he said mockingly. “I mean, inflation is the number one issue, food prices, housing costs, the housing shortage, all of that is absolutely true.”

“And she and Joe Biden are in charge and she has directly cast votes that have led to these conditions. So I don’t know how she plans to separate herself from Joe Biden on this because everything she talked about today, she has a direct hand in,” he added.

Exactly.

He proceeded to slam her for claiming that these higher prices are the result of price gouging versus her and Biden’s policies.

“That is a total canard,” he asserted. “This is not true. This is made up because they’re trying to deflect attention from the actual inflation that has caused everything in your life to get more expensive. So they need the American people to believe something other than the truth, there is no price gouging. Grocery stores, these things, they operate on very slim profit margins. There is no gouging, there is just inflation.”

Fact-check: TRUE.

Jennings wasn’t done.

“So to go out and say, I’m going to get the federal government involved in setting prices or capping prices and interrupting the flow of the free market economy — let me tell you something, if you like bread lines, product shortages, black markets, hoarding, if you want to recreate the happy economic conditions of ‘The Walking Dead,’ Kamala Harris has a plan for you,” he said.

“The bottom line is, the Republicans are going to be all over this. It’s not smart and it’s a plan from a ticket that has no private sector experience and no — and no interest whatsoever in taking responsibility for everything they have done to plunge the working class of the United States of America into an economic crisis,” he concluded.

Ouch.

As previously reported, a large number of others have also bashed Harris’ plan, including former Obama administration economist Jason Furman.

“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 told The New York Times. “There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”

Just to be clear, there are, in fact, a whole host 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.

Vivek Saxena
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