Steve Cortes, former senior spokesman and strategist for the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns and current head of the League of American Workers, is warning that Kamala Harris’ vow to pass the first federal ban on price gouging if she becomes president would lead to “scarcity, shortages, and black markets” for everyday goods in America.
Last week, during a campaign event in North Carolina, Harris said her plan to lower the prices of everyday goods if she were elected president would be to go after the “bad actor” businesses that are not “playing by the rules” by working to pass the first-ever federal ban on price gouging.
Cortes, who began working in finance in 1994, said Harris’ price gouging plan would not only do little to lower prices for everyday goods, but would actually lead to situations similar to those seen in Third World countries like Venezuela and Cuba when it comes to shortages of goods.
“Rather than address the underlying problem, this is a typical answer from a radical Marxist,” Cortes explained on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show. “Now, in the real world, what happens if you say you can only charge [so much] for bread? If you tell that to the farmers who grow the wheat, to the processors who make and bake the bread, to the retailers who sell it, what do you inevitably end up with, and pretty quickly? Less bread. Shortages. That is the simple reality.”
“We don’t have to guess at this. We know it historically. We know it from the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union. We know it right now in Cuba and Venezuela, our neighboring countries who are suffering because of these policies. You end up with scarcity, shortages, and actually black markets…So if you don’t want to have to go find a milk dealer to get milk in the alley, if you don’t want to wait in a bread line, you better vote for Donald Trump because that is what Kamala Harris is proposing,” Cortes added.
Cortes said one of the underlying causes which led to inflated prices during the past four years is the Biden-Harris administration’s energy policies.
“Food does not reach anyone’s table without fossil fuels. That’s the reality. Fossil fuels are also, by the way, very important to growing the food. Fertilizers, almost all, are petroleum-based. Fossil fuels are part of the food production process, from growing it in the ground, all the way to transporting it to the market, to getting it to your table. When energy prices are as elevated as they have been throughout the vice presidency of Kamala Harris, food prices naturally skyrocket,” Cortes explained.
Noting that food prices have risen 20 percent since the Biden-Harris administration took office, Cortes explained that a family of four is paying an extra $300 per month to purchase the same amount of groceries that were bought under the Trump administration.
“Kamala Harris’ own Department of Agriculture, the USDA thrifty food plan, which is a meal plan, a grocery buying plan for a family of four who is trying to be frugal – not ordering takeout, not ordering delivery of food via Uber eats. This is being frugal at the grocery store. According to Harris’ own USDA, it was $675 a month when she took office for a family of four. It is now $975 a month – $300 extra per month. That’s a 44 percent increase. I prefer to talk in dollar terms for folks out there who aren’t all that mathematical – that’s 75 bucks a week, every single week for every family of four in America who’s trying to be frugal. Again, that’s not buying the luxuries. That’s not buying the best stuff in the supermarket. $75 a week for working class people. That is crushing,” Cortes said.
“For people whose budgets are already constrained because the rent is up, the utilities are up, their car insurance is up, adding $75 more a week to live, just to live, not a discretionary item, a necessity, a staple of life, food on the table for you and your children,” Cortes added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
