U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris will call for a federal ban on food and grocery price gouging as part of a broader set of proposals intended to reduce consumer costs, her campaign said in a preview of the first policy speech of her nascent presidential bid.
The Democratic nominee is promising to target price gouging and price-fixing within her first 100 days in office, along with other measures to ease the burden of high prices that have weighed on American households and contributed to many voters’ low marks for President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy.
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Harris plans to direct the Federal Trade Commission and other agencies to investigate and penalize “big corporations” that violate the rules, and to find other ways of tackling price fixing and other anti-competitive practices in the food and grocery industries, her campaign said late Wednesday night.
While price controls have a checkered history in the U.S,, Harris’ team is working to quickly add some proposals to the Biden administration’s achievements and goals, which are at the core of her campaign agenda. She will also detail plans to cut prescription drug and housing costs in an economic address during a visit to Raleigh, North Carolina on Friday.
Former President Donald Trump has made inflation, which spiked early in the Biden administration as the Covid-19 crisis wore on, a centerpiece of his argument that he should be returned to the White House. The Republican candidate and his allies cite Democratic spending programs as a source of the surge in prices for food, gasoline and many other items.
The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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While Harris understands that “price fluctuations are normal in free markets,” her campaign said there is “a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets, and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business.”
Americans, the campaign added, “can see that difference in their grocery bills” as prices have stayed high even as corporations’ costs have leveled off and their profits have stayed high.
Harris, in her speech, will specifically single out the highly consolidated meat industry, deeming its processing middlemen “particularly egregious” price fixers with a history of being found to have illegally controlled prices.
She also plans to direct her administration to carefully scrutinize proposed mergers between large food companies with an emphasis on considering whether they will result in higher grocery prices for consumers. That work would include continuing to examine the proposed merger between Kroger Co. and Albertsons Cos., which faces challenges from the FTC and several states.
The Harris campaign argues that her proposals “stand in stark contrast” to Trump’s economic agenda, which it said “would increase inflation and costs for middle-class families” by levying tariffs on imports of household goods including groceries.