Kamala Harris wants to ban grocery price gouging. What economists think of price controls | The vice president is calling for a ban on grocery price gouging, but several economists and GOP leaders worry price control could cause shortages

> Vice President Kamala Harris will reportedly call for price controls — a federal ban on food and grocery price gouging by corporations — in a speech on Friday.

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> An analysis from the White House Council of Economic Advisers released in 2024 showed there were elevated profit margins for grocery retailers, especially during 2021 and 2022. But the report also noted the majority of the price hikes consumers have seen have not come from corporate markups.

> Instead, inflation, supply chain issues, rising cost of production for companies, the pandemic, foreign wars and other factors like avian flu have kept grocery prices high. A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco [found](https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/economic-letter/2024/05/are-markups-driving-ups-and-downs-of-inflation/) that across the economy markups have not been a major driver of inflation.

> “Yes, consumers are seeing higher prices, but it doesn’t necessarily mean somebody is gouging them,” Kansas State University agricultural economist Glynn Tonsor told The Associated Press.

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> The University of Chicago’s Kent A. Clark Center for Global Markets [surveyed](https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/inflation-market-power-and-price-controls/) 41 U.S. economy experts in 2022 about inflation.

> When these experts were asked if higher inflation in the U.S. was due to corporations raising prices to increase their profit margins, the majority of them either disagreed (51%) or strongly disagreed (16%).

> These experts were also surveyed on whether or not price controls like those deployed in the 1970s could reduce inflation, the majority of experts said they could not.