Former President Donald Trump on Thursday slammed Vice President Kamala Harris’ plan to ban price gouging, likening it to heavy-handed controls wielded by dictators.
Mr. Trump said price controls result in barren shelves.
“They’ve never even worked. Venezuela used price controls, and they got cleaned out,” Mr. Trump told “Fox & Friends.” “You don’t get anything, you end up with empty stores.”
Ms. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, said last week that she would clamp down on “excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business” from food and grocery vendors, particularly after mergers. Her plan was light on details but seemed aimed at punishing high increases instead of setting the actual price.
Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, criticized the plan as part of a wide-ranging conversation with the program, whose hosts are warm toward the ex-president.
Mr. Trump is ramping up his media appearances and stops across the country as he tries to slow Ms. Harris’ surge in polls since she took over the Democratic ticket in July.
The vice president is set to address the nation Thursday in a speech at the Democratic National Convention.
Mr. Trump warned the “country will die” if Ms. Harris wins in November. He described her repeatedly as a Marxist and said the U.S. would suffer from open borders and a lack of energy resources under a Harris presidency.
The former president said Ms. Harris is vulnerable on the economy. He pointed to a major midweek revision in Labor Department data that said the U.S. added 818,000 fewer jobs from early 2023 to early 2024 than the government previously reported.
“Almost a million jobs. They said they had ’em, and they didn’t,” Mr. Trump said. “It was a fraud, they ought to investigate themselves.”
Mr. Trump said the Biden-Harris administration is mostly taking credit for “bounce-back” jobs following the pandemic and said he would get things booming again.
“We will do it again, and we will create the greatest economy in history,” Mr. Trump said.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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