October 9, 2024 • 23 mins
Wayne Resnick fills in this week for Bill who is out on vacation. Hurricane Milton Updates Etc. Prop 35 Health Care. Ghost Guns Spook SCOTUS. Do You Even Price Gouge Bro?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
It is the Bill Handles Show. He is on vacation.
I'm sitting in until nine o'clock. Neil is here, and
Amy is here, and is here, and Kono is here
some of the stories that we're watching for you. Disneyland
has raised their prices again on the park tickets and
(00:27):
the annual passes, which they now call magic keys. So
if you wanted to go for a single day, one
park pass during the peak season, let's say, you know,
in and around Christmas, for example, two hundred and six
dollars just to walk through the gate of Disneyland, And
(00:54):
if you want to be able to hop over to
California Adventure, you got to add sixty five to that.
So that's two seventy one. Wow, it's about a six
percent price increase. Some of these passes twenty percent more.
They cannot stop people they from crowding them their park.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
They can't.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
It doesn't matter. They could charge one thousand dollars a
day and it would still be crowded all the time.
And I wonder how long here's the deal. Let make
a bet, just silently, how long will it be until
a single day, single park ticket to Disneyland is one
(01:34):
thousand dollars? Will it happen in our lifetime? And the
other big story, obviously, Hurricane Milton's on track to make
landfall in and around the Tampa Bay area of Florida
sometime tonightish. But you know, hurricanes have the center part
(01:54):
that's the worst, and then they have these outer bands.
And I was looking at the track, and in about
an hour, some of the outer bands of this storm
are going to are gonna hit Tampa. And because Milton
is so powerful, I don't think it's going to take
the center of the thing to hit before they have
(02:19):
catastrophic flooding and really really high winds and then and
then of course it's it's gonna get worse from there.
K if I will bring you all the updates on
what's going on over there. And I want to take
a couple of minutes here to tell you what scientists
are saying about why Hurricane Milton is so scientifically important.
(02:43):
That doesn't mean it's good and we like it, but
there are at least four different things that are happening.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
The scientists say these are all related to climate change.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Four specific things that work together to explain why and
how how this storm intensified so rapidly. So first of all,
the Gulf of Mexico, the water is much hotter than
it usually is, and we know hurricanes are fueled by
(03:15):
warm water, which is which the heat is energy, and
that energy gives you higher wind speeds and at the
same time, and it's kind of related, but there is
also the issue of the humidity. Now, the warmer the air,
the more moisture it can hold. And because the water
(03:37):
is hotter, the air above it is hotter, it's holding
more moisture there and the storm takes up that moisture
and that also makes the storm stronger. Also, the air
is unstable, meaning can it rises more easily. And what
(04:00):
that does is it lets the hurricane maintain its shape
in its form. If you have very stable air and
a hurricane forms, it'll have trouble kind of keeping it together.
But when the air is that unstable and it's rising quickly, boom,
it just feeds that hurricane and helps it keep its
form and its consistency. And then because of this, La
(04:23):
Nina weather pattern. There's not very much wind shear going on,
the speed of the wind, the direction of the wind.
It's pretty it's pretty uniform at the different elevations. Wherever
you are, it's kind of whatever it's doing, it's going
to stay like that. And this does something that Kim Wood,
(04:43):
who is an atmospheric scientist at the University of Iona,
said Arizona. He's the what this allows the storm to
do is I'm just going to quote him, the storm
can stay nice and vertically stacked. And it made me
think of in like weightlifting, and I don't know, CrossFit
(05:06):
and athletic endeavors, they talk a lot about keeping your
torso stacked, your hips stacked above your knees stacked above
your ankles for stability. So, because there's not a lot
of wind shear to blow different parts of the storm around,
it stays tight, it stays strong, it stays vertically stacked,
(05:29):
and all of that means higher winds, more rain, more devastation.
One of the things that we've seen in recent years
is storms intensifying quite rapidly. That's a newer phenomenon, and
also more rain per type of storm. Rainfall is one
(05:52):
of the best understood parts of science. They call it
attribution science, which is basically knowing scientifically what causes things
to happen. So rainfall, we know a lot about what
makes more rain less rain. And scientists at the Lawrence
(06:12):
Berkeley National Laboratory did an analysis and they say when
Hurricane Helen hit, which was not long ago, some places
in Georgia and in the Carolinas had as much as
fifty percent more rain than the same kind of hurricane
would have dropped, say thirty forty years ago.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
So these are the.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Different environmental factors that have led to Milton becoming a
monster very quickly.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
And it's still a monster.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
And we'll keep you advised of exactly what's going on
and how it's affecting the people over there right here
on KFI. Now Here in California, we have Prop thirty five,
which you may have seen a lot of ads for
Prop thirty There's been quite a bit of spending. I
think that the supporters of Prop thirty five have raised
(07:05):
like fifty million dollars and there are people who oppose
Prop thirty five, but they really haven't raised any money.
And so the chances that you have seen a no
on thirty five ad are infinitiesimal because they're just not
spending any money because they haven't raised any money. But
that doesn't mean it's one of those propositions that everybody loves.
(07:29):
But it is one of those propositions everybody loves. The
basic idea behind it and what it's trying to do.
Here's what's going on. It has to do with healthcare
and getting more money for healthcare. So here in California,
we have a tax on health plans, the Managed Care
Organization tax.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
And if you're in Sacramento and.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
You're walking around and you know everything, you just go,
oh yeah, the MCO tax, and it raises money for
Medica COW, which is the California program for poor people,
health insurance for poor people, and it raises money for
that by taxing the health plans. Now, you have health
(08:15):
plans that serve medical you have health plans that are
like private health plans. I got a Blue Cross a
Kaiser I suppose would fall under that, And there, you know,
there's some health plans that serve both kinds of patients.
So any money raised from this tax, we get a
dollar for dollar match from the federal government. That's like
(08:42):
it's billions of dollars. So what apparently this is so
everybody likes the idea, like if we raise the taxes
on these health plans, for example, or if we funnel
more of the money, we can get more money matched
by the government and maximize the amount of money that
we have to give healthcare to people who can't afford it.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Great most people don't have a problem with that.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Now, part of this has to do with how we've
been handling it, because in California generally, we've been putting
the majority of this tax burden under this MCO tax
on the medical insurers and not on the commercial insurers.
So the Feds now are looking at us and they
(09:28):
don't like what we're doing, and they say that we're
exploiting a loophole in the law that they're going to close,
and they actually send a letter. The Fed sent a
letter to the state and they said medical plans represent
fifty percent of all insured people, but they bear ninety
nine percent of the total tax burden under this MCO
(09:50):
tax plan. And that is not the spirit of the
law where we agree to match dollar for dollar. That
is out what we were trying to do to have
all of that money that you raised through the tax
come from the medical plans. We were trying to redistribute
revenue from the Blue Cross and the Kaiser and those plan,
(10:12):
United Healthcare and so on. All right, So now we
have Prop. Thirty five, and what it's gonna do is
we don't want a tax Blue Cross and Kaiser and
United Healthcare more, but we kind of see we might
have to. So Prop thirty five puts a cap on
the tax that we can put on them, and if
(10:35):
you want to try to raise that, you got to
go back to the ballot box or you got to
get a three force majority of the legislature to do that.
So it's a way of saying to the private insurance industry, yeah, yeah,
I mean, we're gonna tax you under this thing a
little more, but not too much. We're gonna put a
cap on it. It's not gonna be too much. Here's
the problem. Now, that's what Prop thirty five would do.
(10:57):
And the people who oppose it, they're not a post
to more money for healthcare, but they say you do
that where you have you have tied your hands as
to how much you can tax the commercial health insurance plans.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
When the Feds.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Change the rules and close the loophole that they say
we're exploiting. The revenue from the tax will go down,
and that means we'll be leaving billions of dollars in
matching funds on the table and we won't get it
and we will end up being actually worse off. It's
(11:41):
it's that thing of I want to fireproof my home,
and I did it in a way that my house
burned down. So that's Prop thirty five, and you're only
going to see the yes vote yes on it adds
because the other side doesn't have any But if you vote,
you should look into this and think about whether in
(12:04):
the long run what it's trying to do is gonna
work and make things better, or when it's actually gonna backfire.
All right, let's get some news from Amy King, and
then when we come back. It was quite an interesting
oral argument the Supreme Court yesterday about whether or not
the ATF can regulate ghost guns that are made from
(12:24):
kits that you buy and put together yourself as regular firearms.
And the interesting analogies were thrown about by justices on
both sides of the issue.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
If you like omelets, you're gonna love it.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yesterday the Supreme Court heard one of the biggest cases
of this new term. It's called Garland of Evander Stock,
and it's about ghost guns. Ghost guns are kits that
you can buy. They are not guns. When they show
up at your house, you can't You can't open up
(13:00):
the box, reach in and go pew pew pew with
a ghost gun. However, in the box everything you need
to make a gun, and this case is it. First
of all, this is not a Second Amendment case. That's
the main thing to know. This does not have anything
to do with the Second Amendment. This simply has to
(13:24):
do with whether the ATF overstepped its authority when it
decided it was going to regulate these ghost guns the
same way as guns, meaning you would need to pass
a background check, the people selling you the kit would
have to have a federal firearms license, and there would
(13:44):
have to be a serial number on it so that
it could be traced. Because currently, one of the attractive
things about these ghost guns to people is that they
don't have any serial number on them, and they also
don't come ready to go. The idea here is the
federal definition of a firearm is a thing if you
(14:08):
will an object that can be readily converted to expel
a projectile by the action of an explosive. That's why
a BB gun is not a firearm because it's using air,
so that's a firearm under the law.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
And also the.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Frame or the receiver of any such weapon that by
itself is a firearm. So the way that ghost guns
get around all of this is they come incomplete. The
receiver is incomplete, you have to do something to it.
Usually it's drilling a couple of holes. Now some of
these kits, instead of drilling a couple of holes, you
(14:49):
have to file down a railing. But in any event,
with a minor modification, this unfinished receiver then becomes a
real receiver, a usable receiver, and you put it together
and it's a gun. So this case involves some people
who want to have ghost guns and they filed a lawsuit.
(15:10):
Now it's up in front of the Supreme Court, and
it's whether or not the ATF is correct or has
the authority to regulate these things the same way as firearms,
and whether or not what you're getting in the mail
is something that can be readily converted to expel a
projectile by the action of an explosive or whether you're
getting the frame or receiver of any such weapons.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
So it really has to do with how.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Far away from being an actual gun is this kit
that you get. And that's why there was a lot
of talk about omelets by the justices who are asking questions. Now,
the Supreme Court justices love to engage in analogies. So
(15:58):
Samuel Alito, who probably is going to rule in favor
of the ghost gun people, he was asking questions like,
if you have a pen and you have a blank
pad of paper, is that.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
A grocery list?
Speaker 2 (16:16):
And then he said, if you have a bunch of
eggs and ham and peppers, is that an omelet? And
he's trying to say, you know, just because you have
the ingredients for something, that doesn't mean you have the
thing that you can make out of the ingredients, okay.
And then Amy Cony Barrett, who seems to be on
the other side of the issue, said, well, excuse me,
(16:39):
what if you went to HelloFresh or any or any
meal prep meal delivery service and you bought an omelet kit.
HelloFresh delivers these ready to cook meals. You have to
cook it, but they send you all the ingredients and
the instructions.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
So they send you an omelet kit.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
And if you just have a bunch of eggs and
ham and peppers, maybe that's not an omelet.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
But if you.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Buy a kit and the only purpose of the kit
is to make an omelet, and the point of it
is to make an omelet, isn't it really close enough
to being an omelet?
Speaker 1 (17:19):
And so if you don't like guns, maybe you like omelets.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
And that's really the philosophical question that the Supreme Court
is wrestling with here as to the issue of ghost guns.
So it'll be interesting to see how the ruling goes.
Right now, people who saw all the arguments are saying
it looks like five of the justices will support regulating
the ghost guns, and four of them probably will not.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
All right.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Vice President Kamala Harris has an idea to crack down
on price gouging, and it's talking about a federal ban
on price gouging and giving the Federal Trade Commission the
power to go after companies who price gouge. And I think,
(18:10):
you know, there's not a ton of detail in this plan,
but I would say, certainly underneath the idea that the
FTC can go after companies for price gouging. Is that
the FTC would be deciding when it's price gouging.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Now.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Former President Trump other Republicans say this is communists. That
the next step is the government telling businesses how to
set all of their prices.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
People on the left love it.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
They say, hey, corporation, the greed, it's out of control.
This is something we need to do to keep costs down.
Grocery prices are up twenty one percent since President Biden
took office. It's got to stop. So economists have been
looking at this issue of price gouging, and I'm going
to tell you what the found. First of all, there
(19:03):
absolutely is and has been price gouging.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
There's no question about that.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
For example, in Texas, they have opened up an investigation
because they got dozens of complaints that hotels and gas
stations were price gouging during a hurricane Burrel. Walgreens actually
settled the case in New York because they were accused
(19:30):
of jacking up baby formula prices. Do you remember there
was the recall of the baby formula and there was
a shortage for a while. They were accused of jacking
up the prices unnecessarily and New York prosecutors went after
them for doing it, and they agreed to settle. That
doesn't mean they admitted they were price gouging, but generally
when you settle something, it means you'd rather not fight it.
(19:53):
And in Washington State there was an over forty million
dollar penalty against some of the chicken producers and the
tuna producers who they had accused of price fixing. So
there is price gouging. It happens, no doubt about it. Now,
is it happening on a huge scale, or is it
(20:16):
more incidental here happened over there.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Well, the.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Federal Reserve has looked at this, and the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York put out a report earlier this year,
and it was looking at the grocery price increases. This
is one of the most visible areas of inflation to.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
All of us.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Now, they said it was not price gouging. It was
increased operating costs. The price of agricultural products went up,
livestock went up. They also had to pay employees more
because there were labor shortages. For example, since twenty nineteen,
wages in the grocery industry nationwide have gone up an
(21:01):
average of fifteen percent, So they said, no, it wasn't
price gouging really, truly, all their costs went up. The
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco kind of said the
same thing, and the Government Accountability Office found that it
was a series of supply chain disruptions like the Avian
(21:22):
flu messed things up COVID nineteen. Obviously, the war in
Ukraine and those things increased the operating expenses.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Now here's a stat from the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Food manufacturing costs since twenty twenty have gone up twenty
eight point four percent. The retail price increase on food
products since that time averaged twenty six point three percent,
So technically, the average costs in the food manufacturing industry
(21:58):
have gone up higher than the average costs of the
products that they make. Grocery store profit margins fell in
twenty twenty three. So the point is that these entities
are saying, we don't have widespread major industry price gouging.
(22:19):
You do have here and there pockets of it, and
that's bad, and nobody supports actual price gouging. But people
who oppose Kamala Harris's plan say it's not necessary to
do anymore. We already have the laws that we need
to go after actual price gouging. There's a federal law
(22:43):
that says you cannot profiteer during a war or a
national emergency. And of course you've got the antitrust laws
that says industries cannot get together and collude to fixed
prices or all agree to raise their prices. So that's
kind of where the situation stands. Is price gouging a problem.
(23:04):
It's a problem if there's a big fire where you
live and some of the people in the hotels or
the gas stations decide to take advantage of you, and
that is a real problem, and that is terrible and
that should be stopped and stomped on with all due force.
Is there price gouging on a national scale. It seems
(23:26):
like the evidence for it is scant at this time.
It's KFIM six forty live everywhere on the iHeart Radio app.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Catch My Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
It is the Bill Handles Show. He is on vacation.
I'm sitting in until nine o'clock. Neil is here, and
Amy is here, and is here, and Kono is here
some of the stories that we're watching for you. Disneyland
has raised their prices again on the park tickets and
(00:27):
the annual passes, which they now call magic keys. So
if you wanted to go for a single day, one
park pass during the peak season, let's say, you know,
in and around Christmas, for example, two hundred and six
dollars just to walk through the gate of Disneyland, And
(00:54):
if you want to be able to hop over to
California Adventure, you got to add sixty five to that.
So that's two seventy one. Wow, it's about a six
percent price increase. Some of these passes twenty percent more.
They cannot stop people they from crowding them their park.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
They can't.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
It doesn't matter. They could charge one thousand dollars a
day and it would still be crowded all the time.
And I wonder how long here's the deal. Let make
a bet, just silently, how long will it be until
a single day, single park ticket to Disneyland is one
(01:34):
thousand dollars? Will it happen in our lifetime? And the
other big story, obviously, Hurricane Milton's on track to make
landfall in and around the Tampa Bay area of Florida
sometime tonightish. But you know, hurricanes have the center part
(01:54):
that's the worst, and then they have these outer bands.
And I was looking at the track, and in about
an hour, some of the outer bands of this storm
are going to are gonna hit Tampa. And because Milton
is so powerful, I don't think it's going to take
the center of the thing to hit before they have
(02:19):
catastrophic flooding and really really high winds and then and
then of course it's it's gonna get worse from there.
K if I will bring you all the updates on
what's going on over there. And I want to take
a couple of minutes here to tell you what scientists
are saying about why Hurricane Milton is so scientifically important.
(02:43):
That doesn't mean it's good and we like it, but
there are at least four different things that are happening.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
The scientists say these are all related to climate change.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Four specific things that work together to explain why and
how how this storm intensified so rapidly. So first of all,
the Gulf of Mexico, the water is much hotter than
it usually is, and we know hurricanes are fueled by
(03:15):
warm water, which is which the heat is energy, and
that energy gives you higher wind speeds and at the
same time, and it's kind of related, but there is
also the issue of the humidity. Now, the warmer the air,
the more moisture it can hold. And because the water
(03:37):
is hotter, the air above it is hotter, it's holding
more moisture there and the storm takes up that moisture
and that also makes the storm stronger. Also, the air
is unstable, meaning can it rises more easily. And what
(04:00):
that does is it lets the hurricane maintain its shape
in its form. If you have very stable air and
a hurricane forms, it'll have trouble kind of keeping it together.
But when the air is that unstable and it's rising quickly, boom,
it just feeds that hurricane and helps it keep its
form and its consistency. And then because of this, La
(04:23):
Nina weather pattern. There's not very much wind shear going on,
the speed of the wind, the direction of the wind.
It's pretty it's pretty uniform at the different elevations. Wherever
you are, it's kind of whatever it's doing, it's going
to stay like that. And this does something that Kim Wood,
(04:43):
who is an atmospheric scientist at the University of Iona,
said Arizona. He's the what this allows the storm to
do is I'm just going to quote him, the storm
can stay nice and vertically stacked. And it made me
think of in like weightlifting, and I don't know, CrossFit
(05:06):
and athletic endeavors, they talk a lot about keeping your
torso stacked, your hips stacked above your knees stacked above
your ankles for stability. So, because there's not a lot
of wind shear to blow different parts of the storm around,
it stays tight, it stays strong, it stays vertically stacked,
(05:29):
and all of that means higher winds, more rain, more devastation.
One of the things that we've seen in recent years
is storms intensifying quite rapidly. That's a newer phenomenon, and
also more rain per type of storm. Rainfall is one
(05:52):
of the best understood parts of science. They call it
attribution science, which is basically knowing scientifically what causes things
to happen. So rainfall, we know a lot about what
makes more rain less rain. And scientists at the Lawrence
(06:12):
Berkeley National Laboratory did an analysis and they say when
Hurricane Helen hit, which was not long ago, some places
in Georgia and in the Carolinas had as much as
fifty percent more rain than the same kind of hurricane
would have dropped, say thirty forty years ago.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
So these are the.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Different environmental factors that have led to Milton becoming a
monster very quickly.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
And it's still a monster.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
And we'll keep you advised of exactly what's going on
and how it's affecting the people over there right here
on KFI. Now Here in California, we have Prop thirty five,
which you may have seen a lot of ads for
Prop thirty There's been quite a bit of spending. I
think that the supporters of Prop thirty five have raised
(07:05):
like fifty million dollars and there are people who oppose
Prop thirty five, but they really haven't raised any money.
And so the chances that you have seen a no
on thirty five ad are infinitiesimal because they're just not
spending any money because they haven't raised any money. But
that doesn't mean it's one of those propositions that everybody loves.
(07:29):
But it is one of those propositions everybody loves. The
basic idea behind it and what it's trying to do.
Here's what's going on. It has to do with healthcare
and getting more money for healthcare. So here in California,
we have a tax on health plans, the Managed Care
Organization tax.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
And if you're in Sacramento and.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
You're walking around and you know everything, you just go,
oh yeah, the MCO tax, and it raises money for
Medica COW, which is the California program for poor people,
health insurance for poor people, and it raises money for
that by taxing the health plans. Now, you have health
(08:15):
plans that serve medical you have health plans that are
like private health plans. I got a Blue Cross a
Kaiser I suppose would fall under that, And there, you know,
there's some health plans that serve both kinds of patients.
So any money raised from this tax, we get a
dollar for dollar match from the federal government. That's like
(08:42):
it's billions of dollars. So what apparently this is so
everybody likes the idea, like if we raise the taxes
on these health plans, for example, or if we funnel
more of the money, we can get more money matched
by the government and maximize the amount of money that
we have to give healthcare to people who can't afford it.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Great most people don't have a problem with that.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Now, part of this has to do with how we've
been handling it, because in California generally, we've been putting
the majority of this tax burden under this MCO tax
on the medical insurers and not on the commercial insurers.
So the Feds now are looking at us and they
(09:28):
don't like what we're doing, and they say that we're
exploiting a loophole in the law that they're going to close,
and they actually send a letter. The Fed sent a
letter to the state and they said medical plans represent
fifty percent of all insured people, but they bear ninety
nine percent of the total tax burden under this MCO
(09:50):
tax plan. And that is not the spirit of the
law where we agree to match dollar for dollar. That
is out what we were trying to do to have
all of that money that you raised through the tax
come from the medical plans. We were trying to redistribute
revenue from the Blue Cross and the Kaiser and those plan,
(10:12):
United Healthcare and so on. All right, So now we
have Prop. Thirty five, and what it's gonna do is
we don't want a tax Blue Cross and Kaiser and
United Healthcare more, but we kind of see we might
have to. So Prop thirty five puts a cap on
the tax that we can put on them, and if
(10:35):
you want to try to raise that, you got to
go back to the ballot box or you got to
get a three force majority of the legislature to do that.
So it's a way of saying to the private insurance industry, yeah, yeah,
I mean, we're gonna tax you under this thing a
little more, but not too much. We're gonna put a
cap on it. It's not gonna be too much. Here's
the problem. Now, that's what Prop thirty five would do.
(10:57):
And the people who oppose it, they're not a post
to more money for healthcare, but they say you do
that where you have you have tied your hands as
to how much you can tax the commercial health insurance plans.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
When the Feds.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Change the rules and close the loophole that they say
we're exploiting. The revenue from the tax will go down,
and that means we'll be leaving billions of dollars in
matching funds on the table and we won't get it
and we will end up being actually worse off. It's
(11:41):
it's that thing of I want to fireproof my home,
and I did it in a way that my house
burned down. So that's Prop thirty five, and you're only
going to see the yes vote yes on it adds
because the other side doesn't have any But if you vote,
you should look into this and think about whether in
(12:04):
the long run what it's trying to do is gonna
work and make things better, or when it's actually gonna backfire.
All right, let's get some news from Amy King, and
then when we come back. It was quite an interesting
oral argument the Supreme Court yesterday about whether or not
the ATF can regulate ghost guns that are made from
(12:24):
kits that you buy and put together yourself as regular firearms.
And the interesting analogies were thrown about by justices on
both sides of the issue.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
If you like omelets, you're gonna love it.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yesterday the Supreme Court heard one of the biggest cases
of this new term. It's called Garland of Evander Stock,
and it's about ghost guns. Ghost guns are kits that
you can buy. They are not guns. When they show
up at your house, you can't You can't open up
(13:00):
the box, reach in and go pew pew pew with
a ghost gun. However, in the box everything you need
to make a gun, and this case is it. First
of all, this is not a Second Amendment case. That's
the main thing to know. This does not have anything
to do with the Second Amendment. This simply has to
(13:24):
do with whether the ATF overstepped its authority when it
decided it was going to regulate these ghost guns the
same way as guns, meaning you would need to pass
a background check, the people selling you the kit would
have to have a federal firearms license, and there would
(13:44):
have to be a serial number on it so that
it could be traced. Because currently, one of the attractive
things about these ghost guns to people is that they
don't have any serial number on them, and they also
don't come ready to go. The idea here is the
federal definition of a firearm is a thing if you
(14:08):
will an object that can be readily converted to expel
a projectile by the action of an explosive. That's why
a BB gun is not a firearm because it's using air,
so that's a firearm under the law.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
And also the.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Frame or the receiver of any such weapon that by
itself is a firearm. So the way that ghost guns
get around all of this is they come incomplete. The
receiver is incomplete, you have to do something to it.
Usually it's drilling a couple of holes. Now some of
these kits, instead of drilling a couple of holes, you
(14:49):
have to file down a railing. But in any event,
with a minor modification, this unfinished receiver then becomes a
real receiver, a usable receiver, and you put it together
and it's a gun. So this case involves some people
who want to have ghost guns and they filed a lawsuit.
(15:10):
Now it's up in front of the Supreme Court, and
it's whether or not the ATF is correct or has
the authority to regulate these things the same way as firearms,
and whether or not what you're getting in the mail
is something that can be readily converted to expel a
projectile by the action of an explosive or whether you're
getting the frame or receiver of any such weapons.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
So it really has to do with how.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Far away from being an actual gun is this kit
that you get. And that's why there was a lot
of talk about omelets by the justices who are asking questions. Now,
the Supreme Court justices love to engage in analogies. So
(15:58):
Samuel Alito, who probably is going to rule in favor
of the ghost gun people, he was asking questions like,
if you have a pen and you have a blank
pad of paper, is that.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
A grocery list?
Speaker 2 (16:16):
And then he said, if you have a bunch of
eggs and ham and peppers, is that an omelet? And
he's trying to say, you know, just because you have
the ingredients for something, that doesn't mean you have the
thing that you can make out of the ingredients, okay.
And then Amy Cony Barrett, who seems to be on
the other side of the issue, said, well, excuse me,
(16:39):
what if you went to HelloFresh or any or any
meal prep meal delivery service and you bought an omelet kit.
HelloFresh delivers these ready to cook meals. You have to
cook it, but they send you all the ingredients and
the instructions.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
So they send you an omelet kit.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
And if you just have a bunch of eggs and
ham and peppers, maybe that's not an omelet.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
But if you.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Buy a kit and the only purpose of the kit
is to make an omelet, and the point of it
is to make an omelet, isn't it really close enough
to being an omelet?
Speaker 1 (17:19):
And so if you don't like guns, maybe you like omelets.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
And that's really the philosophical question that the Supreme Court
is wrestling with here as to the issue of ghost guns.
So it'll be interesting to see how the ruling goes.
Right now, people who saw all the arguments are saying
it looks like five of the justices will support regulating
the ghost guns, and four of them probably will not.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
All right.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Vice President Kamala Harris has an idea to crack down
on price gouging, and it's talking about a federal ban
on price gouging and giving the Federal Trade Commission the
power to go after companies who price gouge. And I think,
(18:10):
you know, there's not a ton of detail in this plan,
but I would say, certainly underneath the idea that the
FTC can go after companies for price gouging. Is that
the FTC would be deciding when it's price gouging.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Now.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Former President Trump other Republicans say this is communists. That
the next step is the government telling businesses how to
set all of their prices.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
People on the left love it.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
They say, hey, corporation, the greed, it's out of control.
This is something we need to do to keep costs down.
Grocery prices are up twenty one percent since President Biden
took office. It's got to stop. So economists have been
looking at this issue of price gouging, and I'm going
to tell you what the found. First of all, there
(19:03):
absolutely is and has been price gouging.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
There's no question about that.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
For example, in Texas, they have opened up an investigation
because they got dozens of complaints that hotels and gas
stations were price gouging during a hurricane Burrel. Walgreens actually
settled the case in New York because they were accused
(19:30):
of jacking up baby formula prices. Do you remember there
was the recall of the baby formula and there was
a shortage for a while. They were accused of jacking
up the prices unnecessarily and New York prosecutors went after
them for doing it, and they agreed to settle. That
doesn't mean they admitted they were price gouging, but generally
when you settle something, it means you'd rather not fight it.
(19:53):
And in Washington State there was an over forty million
dollar penalty against some of the chicken producers and the
tuna producers who they had accused of price fixing. So
there is price gouging. It happens, no doubt about it. Now,
is it happening on a huge scale, or is it
(20:16):
more incidental here happened over there.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Well, the.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Federal Reserve has looked at this, and the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York put out a report earlier this year,
and it was looking at the grocery price increases. This
is one of the most visible areas of inflation to.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
All of us.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Now, they said it was not price gouging. It was
increased operating costs. The price of agricultural products went up,
livestock went up. They also had to pay employees more
because there were labor shortages. For example, since twenty nineteen,
wages in the grocery industry nationwide have gone up an
(21:01):
average of fifteen percent, So they said, no, it wasn't
price gouging really, truly, all their costs went up. The
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco kind of said the
same thing, and the Government Accountability Office found that it
was a series of supply chain disruptions like the Avian
(21:22):
flu messed things up COVID nineteen. Obviously, the war in
Ukraine and those things increased the operating expenses.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Now here's a stat from the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Food manufacturing costs since twenty twenty have gone up twenty
eight point four percent. The retail price increase on food
products since that time averaged twenty six point three percent,
So technically, the average costs in the food manufacturing industry
(21:58):
have gone up higher than the average costs of the
products that they make. Grocery store profit margins fell in
twenty twenty three. So the point is that these entities
are saying, we don't have widespread major industry price gouging.
(22:19):
You do have here and there pockets of it, and
that's bad, and nobody supports actual price gouging. But people
who oppose Kamala Harris's plan say it's not necessary to
do anymore. We already have the laws that we need
to go after actual price gouging. There's a federal law
(22:43):
that says you cannot profiteer during a war or a
national emergency. And of course you've got the antitrust laws
that says industries cannot get together and collude to fixed
prices or all agree to raise their prices. So that's
kind of where the situation stands. Is price gouging a problem.
(23:04):
It's a problem if there's a big fire where you
live and some of the people in the hotels or
the gas stations decide to take advantage of you, and
that is a real problem, and that is terrible and
that should be stopped and stomped on with all due force.
Is there price gouging on a national scale. It seems
(23:26):
like the evidence for it is scant at this time.
It's KFIM six forty live everywhere on the iHeart Radio app.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Catch My Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
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