Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday finally revealed a handful of her proposed economic policies, including one that would ostensibly address inflated grocery prices by arbitrarily fixing prices nationwide and cracking down on alleged "price-gouging" by "big corporations."

The proposal was so nonsensical that even a former top economics adviser to former President Barack Obama suggested it was all "rhetoric and no reality" and had "no upside" but plenty of negative repercussions, according to Fox News.

It was so bad that it also prompted a liberal economics columnist to opine that it bolstered former President Donald Trump's accusation that Harris is a "communist" and, if implemented, would be counterproductive in that already inflated prices would likely go even higher instead of lower.

"This is not sensible policy"

In a campaign announcement earlier this week as well as a speech on Friday, VP Harris outlined her plan to purportedly reduce the inflated price of groceries by imposing federal price-fixing and authorizing the Federal Trade Commission to go after corporations with "harsh penalties" for alleged "price-gouging" and "excessively high profits."

Except, according to The New York Times, alleged corporate price gouging on groceries is far down on the list of factors that contributed to the inflated prices American consumers have had to deal with for the past few years, if it's even a factor worth considering at all.

The primary factors driving inflation include the Federal Reserve's interest rates and monetary policy, the federal government's massive stimulus spending, the recovery from the pandemic-induced economic recession, and disruptions to the supply chain paired with high demand for goods from consumers, among other things that don't necessarily involve alleged corporate greed, as was so often suggested by the duplicitous Biden-Harris administration.

Jason Furman, a Harvard economist who served as one of former President Obama's top economic advisers, explained inflation as it pertains to grocery prices, "Egg prices went up last year -- it’s because there weren’t as many eggs, and it caused more egg production" that ultimately stabilized the rising prices.

As for Harris' proposal to fix prices and crack down on corporations, the economist argued that doing so would interfere with the normal ebbs and flows of supply and demand in the market, and conversely would prevent prices from falling by discouraging new companies to enter the market with additional supply to meet consumer demands.

"This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality," Furman said. "There’s no upside here, and there is some downside."

Difficult to fully explain how terrible the idea is

Meanwhile, The Washington Post's economics columnist Catherine Rampell wrote of VP Harris' vaguely described price-fixing proposal, "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," she explained. "The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk."

That would result in "shortages, black markets, and hoarding among other distortions" to the markets, not to mention facilitate collusion among corporations to keep prices high, effectively counteracting the purported goal of the policy to lower grocery prices.

Don't propose "communist" policies if you don't want to be labeled a communist

Rampell surmised in her op-ed that VP Harris and her advisers were either "too confused or lazy" to understand the negative ramifications of the price-fixing proposal, nor do they understand that price-fixing and price-gouging are already illegal, that inflation has already largely been tamed -- albeit still at elevated prices -- or how the economic fundamentals of supply and demand actually work.

"But more to the point: If your opponent claims you’re a 'communist,' maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls," she concluded along with an obligatory shot at Trump, as she added, "We already have plenty of economic gibberish coming from the Republican presidential ticket. Do we really need more from the other side, too?"