Is America in an Affordability Crisis?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Bringing on Rory O'Neil now twenty four to seven News
National correspondent, frequent contributor, Rory, good morning.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Hey there, Gary, good morning.

Speaker 3 (00:08):
Good to have you back here.

Speaker 1 (00:10):
I want to talk a little bit about affordability because
we're hearing the words affordability crisis, and a lot of
people are feeling that the Biden inflation doesn't go away
just because the rate goes down. I mean, the prices
don't the price high prices don't go away. What impact
is this going to have on holiday spending? Because I

(00:30):
know retail organizations and so on are concerned and they
do surveys.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
What are we finding.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah, we're seeing that. As I said, affordability is top
of mind for a lot of households, especially as we're
looking at Black Friday happening next week. A lot of
people much more focused now on the holiday shopping season ahead.
So the folks over at wallet Hubb did this. They
looked at individual cities, more than five hundred of them,
and said, all right, what's the average income in that town,

(00:59):
what's the to income ratio there? What's the savings account like?
Do they have a lot of people who have emergency
funds set aside, and they essentially assigned a budget for
each household of what they should be spending based on
those local community numbers. So out of more than five
hundred and fifty cities ranked, Omaha suily a little bit

(01:19):
better than average, coming in at two hundred and three.
They're estimating the holiday budget should be about fifteen hundred
and twenty nine dollars for a typical household in Omaha.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
I wonder how that compares to a typical year. That
sounds when you say the holiday budget, you're you're talking
gift shopping or you're talking food or is that everything?

Speaker 2 (01:42):
It's going to be everything. So how you want to
spread that out, Whether or not you spend more money
on decorations or more money on the on the roast
beef for more money on gifts under the tree, that's
going to be up to you. Maybe you're going to
have turkey because beef prices are so high, but whatever
it may be. Yeah, that's the rule of thumb. They're saying,
based on average income in that community and other savings

(02:04):
numbers that they have.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Man, you've got to wonder about these mom and pop
stores too, particularly the brick and mortar, because of the
popularity of online shopping and now the inflation pressure and.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
What is it? What is it? Shop local?

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Is that a shop local Saturday?

Speaker 3 (02:21):
Small business, small business Saturday. Yeah, that's great, we should
do that.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
American Express started that and it really has grown into
a force to try to get encourage more people to
shop for their local stores rather than the big retailers
out there, or when you go online to shop, so
to support the businesses on Main Street rather than those
on Wall Street.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
I know you're also covering. This is something we haven't
heard a lot about. We heard a lot about it
in the beginning when Donald Trump was campaigning and was
elected that he was going to do away with the
Department of Education.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
What's the latest. What's happening there.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
Well, they can't eliminate it, right or President Trump cannot
eliminate the Department of Education because it was created by
Congress in nineteen seventy nine, but he can make it
pretty useless. And that's what we're seeing happen. So they're
taking different responsibilities and shifting them to other cabinet offices. So,
for instance, the Department of the Interior taking over the

(03:20):
work of the Office of Indian Education, and the State
Department taking over the International education and foreign Language studies programming,
things like that. So we're not really seeing a downsizing
so much as it's a shift to different departments.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
Yeah, the Secretary of McMahon, she basically said she was
appointed to eliminate her job, right, So, well, I don't
know that the Department of Education is anytime a government,
the government just creates something in my lifetime, as they did,

(03:55):
and as you say in nineteen seventy nine of the
Department of Education, it gets loaded, it gets inefficient. I'm
not going to jump on the wagon train that says
they're absolutely useless. I'm sure there are some good things,
there are some benefits, but yeah, if it can be
consolidated in other departments, man, come on.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
Well, it seems to join the opposite of consolidating those
So I'm not sure this.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
Is because first shifting shifting, so it is.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
Being sent out to other departments, which makes it difficult.
I'm not sure this is really a smart strategy long term,
but certainly there's a lot of different issues that can
be addressed and downsizing the department, but that's not really
what's happening. Instead, they're just putting it in other places.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
So the spending is not going to go away.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
No, they're just really taking the workers and saying, okay,
you have a different balls, but you're all still on
the job, so it's not you know, and really this
is the Department of Education is a big way that
these members of Congress send money back home. So this
is it'll be interesting to see how this happens.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
Well, they did, they did during the doge thing. They
fired a bunch of those employees, right.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Right, Yeah, they did a lot of those then got rehired,
and you know, a lot of those are still being
fought in in you know, in court today.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
All right, it's nothing's ever easy, as Rory.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
All right, what will we talk about otherwise?

Speaker 1 (05:18):
I know, great to have you on man, Thanks Rory.
On Neil twenty four seven News National Correspondent