Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary is out on Harris’s economic agenda.
In an interview with CNN on Saturday, the 70-year-old investor tore into several components of vice president and presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’s plan to make the cost of living more affordable for everyday Americans, beginning with her proposal to implement a federal ban on price gouging on groceries.
“They tried that in Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, the USSR,” O’Leary said. “No, that’s not going to work.”
Harris announced a broad economic platform at a rally in North Carolina last week that includes expansions for child tax credits and funding for affordable housing. She also announced a plan to penalize big corporations for price spikes on everyday essentials, a policy that has already become political fodder for conservatives.
O’Leary isn’t alone in comparing Harris’ price gouging proposal to models in socialist states. The Wall Street Journal editorial board on Friday called the plan a resort “to Venezuelan-style left-wing populism,” and argued price controls have failed everywhere they’ve been tried, “from Moscow to Caracas.” The Trump campaign also associated the policy with Cuba and Venezuela following the rollout of Harris’s agenda on Friday.
The cost of groceries has become a touchstone of the persistent inflation President Biden has grappled with since entering office, which has now become a pivotal issue in the presidential race. Food prices have risen more than 20% in the last four years, and more than two-thirds of Americans say food prices are where they’ve seen the effects of inflation the most. Earlier this month, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Kroger, one of the biggest grocery chains in the U.S., accusing the supermarket of price gouging.
O’Leary also ripped the vice president’s new housing platform, which is targeting 3 million new homes by the end of her first term. The plan includes proposals to provide $40 billion in new funding for housing construction and $25,000 grants toward down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers.
“When you give $25,000 to anybody in a constrained market, you cause inflation,” O’Leary said. “So if there’s three houses for sale on the street and everybody bidding on it gets another $25,000, all of that attributes to the seller, and you cause the price of the house to go up because there’s no supply.”
Harris has also proposed new legislation that would crack down on investors who buy houses and apartments in bulk to flip at a higher price.
Skyrocketing home prices have left many first-time homebuyers feeling locked out of the housing market. In an interview with Fortune following President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this year, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Adewale Adeyemo said the affordability crisis wouldn’t be solved until the housing supply increased dramatically.
“Everybody knows in real estate…that it's not controlled by federal mandate,” O’Leary said. “Housing is state by state. She can do nothing to solve that problem. There’s no way she’s building 3 million houses. Which state is going to give her that mandate?”
