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