Barring leap years, there are 1,460 days in an American presidential term. We should keep that number in mind the next time Kamala Harris vows to do this or that on “Day One” of her administration.

For example, when she says, as she did in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, recently, “When I am president, it will be a Day One priority to fight to bring down prices,” what she really means is, It’ll be a Day One Thousand, Four Hundred and Sixty-One priority.

It doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as smoothly, does it?

The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman boiled things down to their essence on Fox News this morning: “Basically, when Kamala Harris and Joe Biden took office, we had a low-inflation, high-growth economy, and they’ve converted it to a high-inflation, low-growth economy — an economy growing about half as fast as it did when they took office, and inflation is double. They’re celebrating this 2.9% [inflation] number this week. That’s double what it was in January 2021.”

I mention all this because it’s the fix that Harris finds herself in: How to talk about the number one issue in the minds of the American people without reminding them that she’s been a big part of the problem for three and a half years. Put another way, by House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, Harris has been “acting as the economic arsonist-in-chief and then trying to show up in a firefighter’s uniform.”

And there’s no escape, not even with a supplicant mainstream media. The lack of message discipline has also been a bit of a challenge. As Biden domestic adviser and former Obama hand Susan Rice told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Tuesday, “I think it’s very important to remember that this has been the Biden-Harris agenda. Kamala Harris has been an integral architect and executor of the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.”

Yikes. With friends like Rice, who needs a proctologist?

Chief among Firebug Kamala’s accelerants are price controls, a favorite tool of central planners everywhere. And while she won’t utter these words later today, when she gives her first policy speech on her economic plan, make no mistake: This is what she’s planning to do. On Wednesday, The New York Times gave us a preview: “Vice President Kamala Harris will call for a federal ban on corporate price gouging on groceries in a speech laying out her economic agenda on Friday, campaign officials said late Wednesday, in an effort to blame big companies for persistently high costs of American consumer staples.”

Right — it’s all the fault of those greedy corporations. You know, like the Kroger grocery chain, whose operating profit as a percentage of sales fell from 2.78% in 2022 to 2.06% in 2023. That’s some seriously incompetent price gouging, no?

Whether capping prices on drugs or groceries, it won’t work. And Harris is planning to do both. Yesterday, as the cheerleaders at PBS trumpeted, “Taxpayers are expected to save billions after the Biden administration inked deals with pharmaceutical companies to knock down the lists prices for 10 of Medicare’s costliest drugs.”

“It might surprise those on the left,” responds Christopher Jacobs at The Federalist, “but companies and investors generally respond to incentives. When the federal government decides to pay less for drugs, it will get fewer drugs in the future.”

Remember: When leftists start talking about “price gouging,” they’re about to start implementing price controls. And price controls don’t work. They never have. If you doubt me, just ask a Venezuelan — you know, like those guys who were famously captured on video a few years ago eating out of the back of a garbage truck. Or ask that desperate mob of skinnies who were gruesomely seen stoning a cow to death.

What’s remarkable here is that the geniuses within the Harris campaign seem to be the only people who don’t know what an awful idea price controls are. Take The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell, for example, who says in her subhead, “It’s hard to exaggerate how bad Kamala Harris’s price-gouging proposal is.” Or take The Economist’s Samuel Gregg, who called it “economic lunacy.” Or his Economist colleague E.J. Anton, who called it “Marxist.”

Man. I can only imagine the panic that’s setting in right now on Kamala Harris’s speechwriting team. Because whatever she says about price gouging later this afternoon will be used against her straight on until November 5.

We know this because a recent Fox News poll made clear that a campaign season which once saw illegal immigration and the economy competing for mindshare among the American electorate is now a one-issue race. And that one issue is the ultimate kitchen-table issue. For a while, folks were most concerned about illegal immigration. But now, as a new Fox News poll shows, by a 38% to 14% margin, It’s the economy, Stupid.

The Democrats are fond of robbing Peter to pay Paul, and while Paul certainly doesn’t object, a lot of Peters do.

In a piece titled “How the Biden-Harris Economy Left Most Americans Behind,” the Wall Street Journal editorial page warns about what’s coming if the American people are stupid enough to elect this closet commie: “Harris is promising the same economic policies [as Biden] with a shinier countenance. Don’t expect better results.”

Yesterday, Donald Trump weighed in during a presser from his Bedminster, New Jersey, estate, calling the Harris price-control plan “a con job” and adding, “If they worked, I’d go along with it too. But they don’t work. They actually have the exact opposite impact and effect, and it leads to food shortages, rationing, hunger, dramatically more inflation.”

Recently, we saw a new Trump TV ad showing a variety of talking heads delivering bad economic news. Interspersed were images of Kamala Harris smiling and saying, “Bidenomics is working,” and, “We are very proud of Bidenomics.”

In the weeks ahead, Harris will have plenty of opportunities to promote Bidenomics, and plenty of opportunities to make herself available to the press. Our sense in that she won’t do either.

Updated with info about Harris’s new drug price-fixing scheme and input from Donald Trump.