Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ proposal to combat price gouging continues to be the subject of misleading accusations from ideological opponents in the mainstream and right-wing media. The latest outcry came from CNBC’s flagship morning news program, which repeatedly and falsely referred to the Harris proposal as a form of “price controls.”
One problem with this narrative is that “Vice President Harris did not propose us,” as University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers noted.
In the August 28 edition of CNBC Squawk BoxMAGA co-host Joe Kernen opened the segment by saying, “Vice President Harris had the choice of telling Americans they are paying higher prices because of the inflation her administration helped create…or she could blame corporations. She chose the latter.”
Conservative columnist and economist Veronique De Rugy responded to Kernen’s softball pitch by acknowledging that Harris’ proposal was politically popular before disparagingly comparing it to convicted former President Donald Trump’s sky-high tariff proposals, which economists across the political spectrum (including De Rugy herself) say will lead to higher consumer prices that could fuel inflation in the future. De Rugy has consistently referred to Harris’ proposal as a form of “price control,” a misleading description she has repeated recently in National Review columns. (De Rugy is often at odds with much of Trump’s economic agenda, but she co-authored a chapter of the pro-Trump manifesto Project 2025 calling for the abolition of the Export-Import Bank of the United States.)
After denigrating Harris’ proposal for nearly three minutes, the panel finally turned to a comment by Justin Wolfers, who pointed out an important aspect that Kernen and De Rugy had overlooked: Kamala Harris has not proposed price controls.
Wolfers says, “In general, price controls are not a good idea when markets are working well, even though they are often popular.” Quoting Harris, he added that the vice president’s proposal focused on “opportunistic companies taking advantage of crises and breaking the rules,” before concluding that “she’s not talking about price controls, she hasn’t used that word once.” Wolfers then reiterated, “We economists as a tribe get very upset when we think price controls are happening. We have to look at the policy — that’s not actually what Vice President Harris proposed.”
Given this simple fact, Kernen derailed the discussion by complaining that an anti-price gouging initiative should not have been among Harris’s first policy proposals, while misleadingly boasting that “wages are still lower than they were when her administration came into office.” (Real wages are higher now than they were before the pandemic, but lower than they were in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic’s massive labor market disruption and government stimulus aid.)
Kernen falsely accused Harris of blaming price gouging for the systemic inflation seen in the U.S. over the past four years. Harris, however, did not blame price gouging for inflation, but instead blamed the phenomenon on disruptions caused by the global pandemic. (Inflation was also a truly global phenomenon, not one limited to the U.S., and the U.S. currently has one of the lowest inflation rates among developed countries.)
Wolfers later responded to Kernen’s outburst by steering the conversation back to Harris’ actual policies, reiterating that they are not price controls and contrasting them with the utter futility of Trump’s proposals to combat the rising cost of living.
CNBC is not the only mainstream news outlet to slam Harris’ campaign for lack of price controls. And many of the arguments in this piece echo misleading reports and op-eds that appeared in the Washington Post last week, which were even briefly quoted at the end of the piece and have already become fodder for the right-wing media’s smear campaign against Harris.
Check out the entire section below:
