Amid GOP freakout, expert says Harris is 'exactly right' to target price gouging

The executive director of a leading progressive think tank said in an appearance on CNBC Monday that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is "exactly right" to target corporate price gouging as part of her broader economic agenda, countering a flurry of bad-faith attacks on the proposal from economists, pundits, Republican lawmakers, and GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. "So this is a common-sense set of policies," Owens said of Harris' proposed federal ban on price gouging in the grocery and food sectors. Owens' remarks came after CNBC anchor Joe Kernen and Stephen Moore, an economic adviser to Trump and a senior visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation—the far-right group spearheading Project 2025—spent several minutes attacking Harris' proposed federal price gouging ban as a violation of "Economics 101" and a "real assault on the whole free enterprise system." On top of proposing the first-ever federal ban on price gouging in the food and grocery sectors, Harris is calling for "clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can't unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive profits on food and groceries" as well as "new authority" for the Federal Trade Commission "and state attorneys general to investigate and impose strict new penalties on companies that break the rules."