[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

“Costs are still too high and on a deeper level, for too many people, no matter how much they work, it feels so hard to just be able to get ahead,” Vice President Kamala Harris said during her presidential campaign rally speech in North Carolina on August 16th.  “Like the cost of food.”

Kamala Harris compared, by way of example, pre-pandemic prices for bread and ground beef (when Donald Trump was president) with the prices today on the Biden-Harris administration’s watch. “A loaf of bread costs 50% more today than it did before the pandemic” she noted. “Ground beef is up almost 50%.”

Former President Donald Trump could not have done a better job himself in describing the failure of the Biden-Harris administration’s economic policies. But Vice President Harris is now speaking as if she were not part of the administration that has overseen the highest increases in prices in four decades. Harris declared that she will start working to bring down prices on the first day of her presidency if she is elected.

Kamala Harris has had three and a half years to start working on bringing down prices while serving as vice president and bragging that she has been “the last person in the room” when President Biden makes policy decisions. But she spent her time making matters worse by casting the tie-breaking votes in the Senate on the two pieces of legislation that fueled the historic inflation – the American Rescue Plan Act and the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.

Now that Kamala Harris is running for president herself, she is proposing socialist-style gimmicks to “fix” the inflation problem she helped to create.

Kamala Harris’s “cures” for supposedly bringing down costs for the middle class are top-down government price controls and massive spending on new government housing subsidies. Harris’s “cures” will only result in another huge inflation spike if implemented. They are the equivalent of trying to put out a fire by pouring more gasoline on it.

Harris proposed a federal ban on “price gouging” by so-called “greedy” food companies and groceries, which would impose price controls on companies that in fact are barely making a profit as it is. Groceries’ average profit margin is 1-3%, hardly enough for anyone with a modicum of common sense to consider as evidence of price gouging.

Nevertheless, Kamala Harris wants federal bureaucrats to decide if the prices that groceries and their food suppliers want to charge for their products are too high and must be blocked by government fiat. The bureaucrats would be free to use vaguely defined subjective metrics to determine what they believe constitutes an “excessive” profit.

Kamala Harris’s proposal does not even pass the smell test for liberal economists.

For example, Jason Furman, the former deputy director of the National Economic Council under former President Barack Obama and certainly no friend of Donald Trump, warned:

“You’ll end up with bigger shortages, less supply and ultimately risk higher prices and worse outcomes for consumers if you try to enforce this in a real way, which I don’t know if they would or wouldn’t do.”

Such price controls, when tried in the past, have led to disastrous distortions in the economy that caused substantial pain for the average consumer. Producers cut back drastically on production to avoid losses at the capped prices set by the government. When the price controls were temporarily eased to give producers more breathing room, the pent-up demand burst open and pushed prices considerably higher as available supplies of products were not nearly enough to meet the soaring demand.

“We’ve seen this kind of thing tried in lots of other countries before; Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union, et cetera,” a liberal economic commentator for the Washington Post and CNN, Catherine Rampell, observed. It is “totally unworkable.”

When former President Richard Nixon tried price controls in this country more than five decades ago, the result was an utter disaster.

“Ranchers stopped shipping their cattle to the market, farmers drowned their chickens, and consumers emptied the shelves of supermarkets,” explained Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, authors of the book entitled The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy.

Such chaos in the food supply and grocery markets is what the American people will likely face if Kamala Harris gets the chance to cook up her plan for government-imposed price controls on food and grocery prices.

Kamala Harris’s  proposed $25,000 down payment assistance for millions of first-time homebuyers is another terrible idea. The Biden- Harris administration’s run away government spending on handouts is what contributed substantially to the historic inflation surge in the first place. Now Harris is proposing another hugely expensive government handout that will set off a further surge in prices for houses while also adding to the federal deficit.

As Michael Jones, an economics professor at the University of Cincinnati, explained, “If they [first-time home buyers] have $25,000 more to spend on a house, they’ll submit bids up to $25,000 higher for the home. That policy in particular is a bad idea because it won’t bring the price of housing down.”

In a worst-case scenario, we could face a repeat of the 2008 housing crisis. Misguided home “affordability” policies made it easier for high-risk borrowers to become homeowners who could not keep up with their monthly mortgage payments, resulting in mass foreclosures.

What would a Harris-Walz administration do if some of the first-time home buyers receiving $25,000 of taxpayer money for their down payments cannot keep up with paying off their mortgage debt? Would a Harris-Walz administration step in and bail out the debtors at taxpayers’ expense rather than allow their homes to go into foreclosure? Harris does not say.

Will Kamala Harris extend her taxpayer-funded down payment subsidy to illegal immigrants so that they can buy American homes, adding to the demand that would drive up prices further? Harris does not say. But we do know that her track record as California’s attorney general, California’s senator, and vice president of the United States is pro-illegal immigrant.

President Biden said that he is ready to pass the torch to Kamala Harris. She will now be in a position to torch the economy herself with her dangerous proposals if she wins the election.