The food industry has slammed Vice President Kamala Harris for blaming high inflation under the Biden-Harris administration on corporate greed and proposing price controls on food and groceries.
“We understand why there’s this price shock and why it’s upsetting,” said Andrew Harig, vice president of FMI, an industry association that represents food retailers and suppliers. “But to automatically say there must be something evil going on is, in my opinion, too simplistic.”
Food industry executives said Companies have increased spending due to rising worker wages and supply chain costs under the Biden-Harris administration. Wall Street Journal Harris’ claims of consumer exploitation are misleading, as the profit margins of food manufacturers and retailers remain modest compared to other industries.
“The proposal to ban price gouging in the grocery trade is a solution in search of a problem,” the National Grocers Association told the magazineand pointed out that its members suffer from the same inflation as its customers.
Harris, who will formally accept her party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention this week, has come under criticism since she called for a series of radical economic policies on Friday, including an unprecedented federal ban on gouging prices on food and grocery stores that economists compare to communist regimes.
“They tried price controls in Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and the USSR. No, that won’t work,” Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary said Saturday.
Bob Unanue, CEO of the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the United States, said Harris’ economic proposals would drive “the final nails in the coffin of this economy and this country” and that the Biden-Harris administration had started “a war” against the American middle class from day one.
“People vote with their stomachs,” Republican candidate Donald Trump said of food prices, which were still nearly 30 percent higher in July than in 2019, according to Labor Department data. Harris’ price controls on food would lead to “rationing, hunger and skyrocketing prices,” the former president added.
