On Tuesday, Agriculture and Industry Commissioner Rick Pate responded to the possibility that the federal government under President Kamala Harris might impose price controls to curb inflation in an interview with Mobile Radio FM Talk 106.5’s “The Jeff Poor Show.”
Pate said that the stores’ margins were already very tight and expressed skepticism about how such a system could be arbitrarily enforced.
“That would be terrible,” Pate said. “I don’t know when these price controls were put in place. How do you prove that someone actually charged something? But I mean, in America, you have all this competition, we have people competing with everybody. There’s hardly an industry where there isn’t competition. And of course, people are trying to make a living and get a fair wage. But yes, someone would come and, as I said, take away markets here if they just arbitrarily raised prices and ripped people off.”
“Yeah, I don’t know — knowing the economics, I don’t even know how you — that’s just a political statement,” he continued. “I mean, I just can’t imagine you would come in and say you’re going to get people to maintain that price no matter how their input costs have changed. Well, yeah, you know, yeah, I think that’s just political talk. They’re certainly not going to do that.”
Jeff Poor is editor-in-chief of 1819 News and host of “The Jeff Poor Show,” heard Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to noon on Mobiles FM Talk 106.5. To contact him or to comment, email [email protected] or follow him on Twitter. @jeff_poor.
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