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Fox Business host Charles Payne said Monday that Vice President Kamala Harris was “deflecting” voters’ attention away from the failure of the Biden administration’s application of “modern monetary theory” by calling for price controls.

Harris called for a federal ban on “price-gouging” by grocery stores to address high prices during a Friday speech on economic policy in North Carolina. Payne accused Harris and President Joe Biden of causing inflation by infusing “money that was not earned” into the economy.

“The Biden-Harris modern monetary theory, you know, the $1.9 trillion the economy didn’t need, another trillion dollars for the Inflation Reduction Act, and more money here and more money there, don’t pay this, don’t pay that,” Payne told Fox News host Sandra Smith. “They created a groundswell of inflation that, to be quite frank, I don’t think anyone thought could ever come back, 42-year high inflation, and by the way we’ve only compounded it. The CPI number last week, I heard people saying it was good, no, as long as these numbers keep going up, it’s not good because it adds to it and adds to it. The pain and misery of almost everybody in this country, outside of the most fortunate, it’s pretty clear.”

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Prices shot up by over 20% since Biden and Harris took office in January 2021, with inflation reaching a recent high of 9.1% in June 2022.

“So, with this device you get two things: One, you get not only to trying to deflect your involvement, their fingerprints, Biden-Harris’ fingerprints, they own inflation, some of this belongs to the Fed but the majority of it belongs to them,” Payne continued. “Money that was poured into this economy that was not earned, but was spent.”

Harris’ proposal to combat alleged “price-gouging” relies on legislation allowing the Federal Trade Commission to impose “harsh penalties,” according to The New York Times. A bill authored by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts would grant the agency the authority, with Harris co-sponsoring similar legislation introduced by Warren in 2020.

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“Pitching Politics of envy, anti-corporation, corporate greed, has always been in the Democratic playbook. That’s not brand-new. So, in that case it was just like, ‘Hey, these greedy corporations are taking your money, I will come to the rescue.’ So, that’s not new, that’s deeply embedded in their playbook,” Payne said when Smith asked who suggested the policy. “I saw Mark Zandi in Axios today, and you know, listen, Mark Zandi, I met him a few times, I like him as a person, but I think he has sort of rubber-stamped a lot of the bad ideas in the Biden-Harris administration, and we know there have been a lot because Democrats along the way, from Jason Furman and others have said ‘Don’t do this’ and ‘Don’t do that.’ Larry Summers, please don’t do the $1.9 trillion. Where we are now, they all predicted we’d be here.”

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