Fox News host Mark Levin offered Vice President Kamala Harris a basic lesson in how economics works by sharing a portion of a six grade test on the subject on his program Sunday night.
Levin’s teaching came after Harris unveiled her plan to tackle inflation, which included price controls — a policy that did not work out well for the United States in the 1970s nor in communist nations that tried it like the former Soviet Union or Venezuela, where it resulted in shortages in food and consumer goods.
Even a columnist for the left-leaning Washington Post wrote regarding Harris’ plan, “It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food.”
“Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The [Federal Trade Commission] would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.”
Experts interviewed by ABC News offered similar assessments.
Former President Donald Trump said Harris is “running on the Maduro plan,” referring to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trump argued it is “like something straight out of Venezuela or the Soviet Union. This announcement is an admission that her economic policies have totally failed and caused really a catastrophe for our country.”
President Trump EXPOSES Kamala’s true plan for the economy: “She’s running on the Maduro plan.” pic.twitter.com/dfyCFtFeYR
— MAGA War Room (@MAGAIncWarRoom) August 15, 2024
The new floor for prices created by the Joe Biden-Harris administration policies is about 20 percent higher than when they took office.
Do you think Harris understands basic economics?
Harris, as vice president, cast the tie-breaking votes in the Senate for the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in 2021 and the over $1 trillion Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which economists on both sides of the political aisle saw as inflationary, because the legislation created a false a demand using borrowed and printed federal government dollars that overheated the economy.
In his Fox News program Sunday night, Levin said, “This show is a public service. It’s a public service to educate somebody who is utterly illiterate when it comes to economics. And that would be Vice President Kamala Harris, who seeks to be president of the United States.”
“I’ve taken the liberty of pulling a 6th grade economics test off of the internet,” the host continued, “… because clearly she did not get a course in basic economics and hasn’t read a book on it lately, either.”
Levin asked a few questions but focused in on the law of supply and demand, i.e., prices are determined by the marketplace. When demand exceeds supply, prices go up and vice versa.
The former Reagan administration official read from the six grade test, “What determines the prices of goods in a market economy? a) customs and traditions, b) government agencies, c) supply and demand, d) customers.”
The answer was, of course, c.
Levin then proceeded to show a video put together by the Competitive Enterprise Institute on the manufacturing of a lead pencil.
It noted the thousands of people that are needed to create the pencil that is made up of four basic components: cedar wood shaft, graphite lead, rubber eraser, and a metal ferrule that attaches the eraser to the shaft.
The raw materials for these components come from all over the world, requiring people to harvest and mine them and others to decide where to purchase them from, based on current market conditions.
They must then be transported thousands of miles to be manufactured into a pencil. Many decisions are made along to way to get to the finished product and into the hands of a consumer.
Levin held up a pencil and said, “The federal government doesn’t know how to make this pencil.”
“Do you know what Kamala Harris wants to do to this pencil? She wants to break it. You know how you break it? Taxes, regulations, interference, harassment, legal investigations,” he added, breaking the pencil to illustrate his point.
“You see how complicated it is to make a pencil? Imagine running a health care system. … Imagine running the energy system in this country … Or how about our food chain,” Levin said.
He concluded, “Kamala Harris tells you, ‘We’ve got to get prices down. We’ve got to get food costs down.’ I sit here constantly in amazement that the arsonist is telling us how to put out the fire.”
Hopefully, Harris will be ushered out of office in November, so her ignorance of basic economics will no longer hurt the American people.
