CNN’s, WaPo’s Rampell: Casey’s ‘Gouging’ Bill Is ‘Kind of Thing’ Venezuela, Soviets Tried

On Friday’s “CNN News Central,” CNN Economics and Political Commentator, Washington Post columnist, and “PBS NewsHour” Special Correspondent Catherine Rampell discussed various “price gouging” proposals and stated that legislation from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) “is especially bad” and “We’ve seen this kind of thing tried in lots of other countries before, Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union etc.” She also argued that the legislation actually could drive prices higher.

Rampell said, “Well, first of all, nobody can explain what price gouging means. It’s like that old line about pornography, I know it when I see it. In the sense that, what does it mean to have an excessive price or an excessive profit margin? That seems to be shorthand for a price or a profit margin that bugs me, that seems too high. So, it’s very hard to pin down what this would actually mean. If you look at the legislation that, as I mentioned, is already in the Senate, led by Sen. Warren and Sen. Bob Casey and a slew of others, the particular way that this is written, which is likely to be the template for any proposal that Harris would eventually embrace, is especially bad, in that it just bans excessive prices, grossly excessive prices, grossly excessive profit margins, and says that the Federal Trade Commission can use any metric it deems appropriate to decide what that would mean, which basically says, like, it’s not going to be markets, it’s not going to be supply and demand that’s determining how much your grocery store charges you for milk or for eggs, it’s going to be some bureaucrat in D.C., which seems like, totally unworkable, first of all, for the FTC to be deciding, like, how much Kroger charges for eggs in Michigan. But it also would be very bad for markets.”

She continued, “We’ve seen this kind of thing tried in lots of other countries before, Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union etc. It leads to shortages, it leads to black markets, plenty of uncertainty, and beyond that, the specific way this bill is written might actually increase prices, because of some of the other language in it, things like requiring companies, public companies to disclose in their quarterly reports — their quarterly earnings reports how they’re setting prices, which is a great way to help them collude, which, normally, we don’t want them to do.”

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