US Vice President Kamala Harris will push for a nationwide ban on excessive food and grocery prices as part of a broader campaign to lower consumer costs, her campaign team said in a preview of the first policy address of her upcoming presidential candidacy.
The Democratic candidate promises that within her first 100 days in office she will crack down on price gouging and price fixing and take other measures to ease the burden of high prices that are weighing on American households and have contributed to many voters’ poor rating of President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy.
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Harris plans to instruct the Federal Trade Commission and other agencies to investigate and punish “large companies” that violate the regulations. She also plans to find other ways to crack down on price fixing and other anti-competitive practices in the food and grocery industry, her campaign team said late Wednesday evening.
Although price controls have a checkered history in the U.S., Harris’ team is working to quickly add some proposals to the Biden administration’s accomplishments and goals that form the core of her campaign agenda. She will also detail plans to lower prescription drug costs and housing costs in an economic speech during a visit to Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday.
Former President Donald Trump has made inflation, which spiked early in the Biden administration in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, a central argument for his return to the White House. The Republican candidate and his allies cite Democrats’ spending programs as the cause of the rise in prices of food, gasoline and many other items.
There was no immediate response from the Trump campaign team to a request for comment.
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While Harris acknowledges that “price fluctuations are normal in free markets,” her campaign said there is “a big difference between fair prices in competitive markets and inflated prices that are disproportionate to the cost of doing business.”
Americans, the campaign continued, “can see this difference in their grocery bills,” as prices remained high even as companies’ costs stabilized and their profits remained high.
In her speech, Harris will particularly single out the highly consolidated meat industry and describe its middlemen as “particularly blatant” price-fixing agents who have already been proven to have engaged in illegal price controls in the past.
She also plans to direct her administration to carefully review proposed mergers between major grocery companies, paying particular attention to whether they will result in higher grocery prices for consumers. That work would include further review of the proposed merger between Kroger Co. and Albertsons Co., which is being challenged by the FTC and several states.
The Harris team argues that their proposals are “in stark contrast” to Trump’s economic agenda, which would “increase inflation and costs for middle-class families” by imposing tariffs on imports of household goods, including food.
