Brooks: Harris’ ‘Illiteracy’ on Prices ‘Surprising in a Responsible’ Candidate Whose Administration Helped Cause Inflation

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said that 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris’ “gouging” proposal “expresses a level of economic illiteracy which is kind of surprising in a responsible Democratic candidate.” And that the entire idea requires you to believe that “we had all these years of low inflation under Obama and under Bushes. And I guess people weren’t greedy then. And then Biden gets in, and suddenly, magically, they all get greedy and start price gouging.” He also said that the Biden administration overstimulating the economy helped cause inflation.

Brooks said, “I think the child tax credit is a good thing. She wants to de-regulate housing, so we can get more homes. But the price gouging is just — well, Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post columnist and a ‘NewsHour’ contributor, said it’s impossible to exaggerate how bad this policy is, and I agree with that. And Catherine had a good line that if your opponent is calling you a Communist, maybe don’t lead with price controls. And so, price controls just create shortages. They create black markets. We’ve seen it happen in Venezuela. We’ve seen it happen in the Soviet Union. Price controls just don’t work. What’s worse about that, first, it’s trying to address a problem that does not exist. Grocery prices, inflation has been less than 1% for the past year. It’s over. We had a surge, but it’s over. The problem does not exist.”

He continued, “But the real core problem is it expresses a level of economic illiteracy which is kind of surprising in a responsible Democratic candidate. The idea behind greedflation is that we had all these years of low inflation under Obama and under Bushes. And I guess people weren’t greedy then. And then Biden gets in, and suddenly, magically, they all get greedy and start price gouging. And they do it at [Kroger], at Harris Teeter, at H-E-B. Suddenly, there’s this massive price gouging. And she thinks she can prosecute it. That’s not why inflation surged. Inflation surged because we had a pandemic, which screwed up supply chains and productivity, then the Biden administration overstimulated the economy, too many dollars chasing too few goods. Obama administration officials Larry Summer[s] and Jason Furman said at the time, this is going to cause inflation. Lo and behold, it did.”

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