Rep. Michael Rulli (R-OH), who owns a grocery store, said Vice President Kamala Harris’s plan to prevent “price-gouging” in the food industry would backfire by creating shortages and causing grocery stores to shutter.
Rulli, who owns the Rulli Bros. Markets, based in Youngstown, Ohio, along with his brothers, spoke to the Washington Examiner about Harris’s plan Tuesday. During an interview, Rulli said Harris’s plan is "reckless" and would lead to pain for consumers, calling it “dangerous rhetoric” from the Democratic presidential nominee.
“It’s almost like Kamalaism, it’s like communism with her twist to it,” Rulli said. “She is going to turn this place into Cuba and Venezuela and every other third-world nation that you can imagine, and this is how she's going to do it.”
Harris rolled out the price gouging plan, her first new economic policy proposal, earlier this month. The campaign announced that Harris would try to enact the “first-ever federal ban on corporate price-gouging.”
Rulli, 55, was first elected to represent Ohio’s 6th Congressional District this year after Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH) resigned to take a position as president of Youngstown State University.
Rulli, whose grocery stores employ over 200 people and have been in the family for over 100 years, said implementation of Harris’s proposal would be disastrous for grocers and consumers. He noted that grocery stores, unlike other businesses, operate on wire-thin profit margins and said a lot of grocery stores in Ohio have already gone out of business because it's hard to operate in such an environment.
He said Harris’s plan, if implemented, would lead to shortages.
For instance, Rulli said, his stores recently had a special of $5.99 for Tide detergent, and if the government were to tell Proctor and Gamble that it needs to keep the price at $5.99, keeping Tide on shelves would become prohibitive after a month or two.
He said, eventually, the price of plastic, oil, transportation, and other inputs will start increasing and Proctor and Gamble would have to pay more than $5.99 to produce Tide.
“If it goes up to $6.29, why in the world would they ever make a product that they're going to lose money on? They will very simply choose not to make that product,” Rulli said.
Rulli said, right now, his grocery has about 38,000 SKUs, which are unique codes to track different products in a store. He argued that if Harris’s plan is implemented, the number of unique products on his shelves will plunge precipitously. That would mean fewer choices for consumers about what brand of pasta they can buy, or which paper towel product is available, he said.
“What she's gonna do is limit what you can buy, and she’s gonna destroy the beautiful quality and standard of living that we have in the country for the regular person that she is proclaiming to love,” Rulli said. “It’s pure insanity.”
Grocery prices are one of the most noticeable aspects of inflation, given that everyone has to eat. Grocery prices have only increased by 1.1% since last year, according to the consumer price index, but since January 2021, when President Joe Biden was sworn in, they have increased a whopping 21%.
But Harris’s proposal, which is still somewhat vague, has little chance of passing in Congress. Several Democratic lawmakers told Politico that such a move has no chance of passing anytime soon, even if Democrats win control of Congress.
Ryan Young, senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recently told the Washington Examiner that he thinks election-year politics were behind the proposal and compared it to other ideas being floated, such as former President Donald Trump’s suggestion of a new across-the-board tariff regime.
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“It’s posturing,” he said.
Harris’s campaign has been criticized for its relative lack of clear policy positions. The Harris campaign recently said she endorsed the tax provisions in Biden’s fiscal 2025 budget that target the wealthy and big corporations, although further details of her economic agenda are still forthcoming.
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