America's Talking - Episode 38: Bipartisan effort to repeal federal mask mandate on planes gains momentum

Episode Date: March 18, 2022

Bipartisan effort to repeal federal mask mandate on planes gains momentum. Biden blames gas prices, inflation on Putin, but critics push back. Inflation and rising costs likely to impact food prices in particular. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

One of the reasons food prices in particular arising is because costs are rising for farmers. And they've been experiencing that for months. But now with the invasion of Ukraine, that's expected to get a lot worse. Welcome to American Focus. I'm Cole McNeely, General Manager of America's Talking Network. American Focus is a production of America's Talking Network. You can listen to American Focus and all of our podcast at AmericasTalking.com. That's America's Talking.com.

Now here's your host, Dan McAulip. Thank you, Cole, and welcome to the America in Focus podcast. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. America in Focus is brought to you by America's Talking Network, the podcast tub where you can find news, civil conversations, and all of the Center Square's great podcasts. Go to America's Talking.com to check out all of our available podcasts. Once again, that's America's Talking.com. Joining me today, as he does every week, is Casey Harper. Yesterday was St. Patrick's Day. Are you sober right now? Oh, wow. Yes, I am sober and I'm wearing green. My wife wasn't. She got the pinch. But no, I'm totally sober. I know it's, you know, surprising to you, Midwesterners who just can't make it through the week without, you know, going there. But yes, I am sober. I thought maybe you were out till three o'clock in the morning. So not even hungover? Nope, not hungover. I am. You know, when when you are a part of the, the world's greatest podcast, Dan, you can't go out the night before. I was spent, you know,

four or five hours last night prepping for this podcast, of course. I'm glad to hear that. It came to work prepared today. We and, of course, Americans for months have been talking about the rising gasoline prices, the rising inflation. One topic we haven't touched on on podcast, but you wrote about this past week and what that could mean for future food security in the country. Why don't you tell us a little about your reporting on that story? Yeah, I will. And I just realize, you probably answered a lingering question for our listeners, uh, some of whom may think that this podcast is the drunken ravings of, of a couple of guys in their basement or something. But no, we are, are sober and not drunk for every podcast. But, uh, farmers, farmers hit,

uh, are getting hit really hard by these price increases. Um, there's a few reasons for that. Of course, everyone's prices are going up around the country. If you've filled up your gas tank, recently you've experienced that firsthand. If you've been to the grocery store, you've seen it. If you've made a budget, you've probably had to increase your monthly allotment for a lot of different things, maybe decrease your savings or your investment in your 401K because around the country prices are going up. Now, one of the reasons food prices in particular are rising is because costs are rising for farmers. And they've been experiencing that for months. But now with the invasion of Ukraine, that's expected to get a lot worse. One,

major reason for that is fertilizer. Ukraine is a major supplier, a fertilizer to the world, actually. And they are really a bread basket for a lot of, a lot of the world, including Africa, like parts of northern Africa. And so there's, you know, I talked to an expert for this story who basically told me,

I didn't put this in the story, but he said we could expect, you know, famine in parts of Africa because of the invasion of Ukraine. It's that, it's just really, really is a one-to-one. But, you know, I talked to different, you know, people, the Indiana Farm Bureau President Randy Kron. And he told me that fertilizer is up as much as 500% in some areas. I mean, 500% increase in fertilizer. And the interesting thing is, you know, that's been increasing.

And it's just higher now than it has been in recent months. And it's probably going to get higher because of things like Ukraine. But because of the way that the crops are set up, we won't feel those effects for a few months. And so if you have to put in fertilizer for this crop, that is 500. percent more expensive. We won't feel those expenses for six to nine months when that crop is harvested and sent to market, right? And so there is a little bit of a delay, but this really tells you what consumers, what our listeners can expect for the rest of this year, and it's a little bleak. Yeah, I heard a stat that some are predicting among the most dire predictions is that food

production could be down as much as 5 percent. And, you know, whether you're not, you know, whether you think, whether that sounds like a lot, 5% of a 5% drop in food production because of this situation would be massively bad. You mentioned famine in Africa. I mean, there could be food shortages, lots of places. And of course, that probably means, you know, Americans have already been paying more for just about everything, including groceries. that food prices are only going to go up before they start coming down.

That's right. That's right. And, you know, one of the clearest measures of wealth in a country is what percentage of their income they have to spend on food. You know, so the poorer country is the more they're spending over half or the majority of their income, their daily income, just to buy enough food to survive. And so, you know, it's one of the most consistent. obvious measures of a country's wealth or just standard of living is are you spending is food and basic survival just a small part of your budget or is it the majority of your budget? So the more that increases as a percentage of Americans budget, quite literally, the poor they're

getting. And I talked to, you know, an expert, this guy, Nathan Carson, he runs, you know, helps run a supply chain for a large fertilizer company called Chemical Dynamics, really smart guy. and he said that food prices, he expects food prices to go up, you know, about 10% before the midterms, which is pretty significant. Another, you know, 5% or so more by the end of the year. And he said it could even get up by 20% food price inflation. Now, that would be a high estimate. He said, but it's possible to get up to 20% higher just this year. And many Americans' budgets are already stretched because of the increased cost of gasoline.

because we're coming out of winter here in the northern part of the country, hopefully, but the increased cost of heating your homes during this past winter, my gas bills, I've never seen my home heating bills as high as they've been this winter. And Americans who live from paycheck to paycheck, lower-income American, senior citizens who are on fixed incomes, they're the ones that are impacted the most. So we've got to keep a close eye on this story and just inform, you know, our readers and our listeners here what it could mean for them and just just be aware. Yeah, that's absolutely right.

And while, you know, Social Security, for instance, you know, there are raises to Social Security, but it's not anywhere near 20% for 20% more expensive food, right? So it's usually very stable. They're marginal increases and they cannot keep paying. with the increases we're seeing your prices right now. Right. All right. Thank you for your reporting on that. Casey,

why don't we move on? Speaking of higher prices, everyone's aware, as we talked about, gas prices are significantly higher. Here in Illinois, we're on base. They're above $450 a gallon.

Some of that has to do with the high taxes we pay here in Illinois, but all Americans are paying significantly higher prices of the gas pump. Many have blamed President Joe Biden, and his policies for it, but President Biden himself is blaming inflation on Russian President Vladimir Putin. You wrote about this week. Critics are pushing back against that. Tell us about that.

Yeah, Dan, if you look at your window right now, you might see a KBG agent siphoning gas out of your tank as we speak. The epidemic of gas stealing Russians in this country is just out of control. But no, I mean, I think Biden's kind of joking, but I think that's because Biden's accusation that Putin's to blame for these prices has kind of been laughed off by a lot of critics. There's a few reasons for that. One, these price increases have been going on since Biden took office long before Russia was even really amassing these troops at the border. Because that's the other thing. Biden will say, well, yeah, this wasn't just because of the invasion, but he'll point to January and say how, you know, the price of oil and things went up when Russia began. and putting more troops at Ukrainian's border. And that's true. But if you look at gas prices, have been steadily rising since he took office. Inflation has been really soaring since he took office.

And to his credit, it was rising somewhat before he took office for a few months before he took office. But there's a few reasons for all these price increases. And it is a little more complex maybe than political pundits trying to make it seem. There were some supply chain problems with COVID. that is a problem. And that's really what Biden was blaming before Russia. This invasion of Ukraine will have an effect and it has already had an effect. But the one very significant cause that Biden never seems to bring up is the runaway federal debt spending. You know, federal debt spending, you know, really spiked last year. There are several multi-trillion dollar bills that were passed. And a lot of people didn't even notice that Congress just.

past another $1.5 trillion, you know, last week. So the federal spending has really gone up, and that never seems to go into the equation of why these prices are going up. Of course, the way that you help offset federal debt spending is you print more money to help offset the cost. And so every time you see these trillion-dollar bills come through, just know that that means a lot more money is going to be printed and pushed into the economy to compensate for it. I just want to go back briefly to the beginning of this segment. You joked about the KGB being outside my window siphoning off the ass. We've actually, we've had consumer alerts from a number of area police departments,

you know, where I live here in northeast Chicago or northeast Illinois in the suburbs of Chicago, that it's a new trend and to watch out for it. that folks are drilling into people's gas tanks and actually stealing gas. Wow. You mean actually drilling a hole in the car? Yes. Wow. Yes.

To essentially steal gas. Now, we try to keep our opinions to a minimum, but I feel safe and saying, that's not a good idea. Please don't do that. Yes, we are firmly against crime at thecinterspare.com. Well, you went out on a limb there, Casey. Yeah. Right.

So another thing that is being blamed for the high gas prices is President Joe Biden's essentially energy policies on day one when he took office. He canceled permitting for the Keystone Pipeline, which was meant to drill convalesies. Canadian fuel the oil and gas into the U.S. He halted new leases for oil and gas drilling on private lands, placed new restrictions and regulations on the oil and gas industry that drove up production costs. Now there's a new poll out this week that shows Americans want the administration to essentially go back to energy independence for the U.S. Tell us about this poll. Yeah, you're absolutely right that this poll found that the majority of Americans actually support increasing domestic gas

production. So Convention of States Action, along with the Trafalgar Group, they released this new polling data, and it found that 77.3% of surveyed Americans say that just given what, you know, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that Biden should make American energy production. a top priority. And even 77 point, well, to say, 78% of independence and 67% of even Democrats agreed with this. People are seeing what's happening in gas pump. They're seeing how we've become so reliant on foreign sources of oil. You know, Biden kind of infamously after restricting domestic oil production,

called on foreign powers like OPEC to produce more, to produce more oil so that they can meet the American supply. So then they may kind of not. Go ahead. I was going to say, and the big question about that is, you know, the U.S. oil and gas industry have taken many steps through the production process, through the cleaning process, to lower emissions or to improve emission standards on oil and gas, where many of these foreign countries, OPEC, Venezuela, have not done that. So it's dirtier oil and gas overseas, yet that's Biden's solution. Right. And not to mention that it has to be shipped around the world to get here. Right. Which burns energy.

Right. Exactly. You know, all the tankers and the ships shipping it over here all the way across the world versus just a pipeline, which actually pipelines are pretty controversial, but they're the safest and most energy efficient way. You know, what's more energy efficient to have one continuous pipeline that's between contiguous countries or to fill up barrels, put them on a ship, lug them across the country, unload them, put them on trucks or, you know, put them across the engine in the case.

Right, exactly. OPEC and other foreign nations. Yeah, that's true. And so the polling found, you know, well, I do, I want to go back, though, and say that when things don't really make sense, I don't just say, oh, the, the politicians are stupid or I'm trying to figure out what information am I missing. What's going on here? And this is a little bit of speculation.

But I think, you know, Biden is under a lot of pressure from the progressive wing in his party to cut oil production, to cut reliance on fossil fuels to appease the environmentalist wing of his party, which is a very strong wing of the Democratic Party. And in peacetime, when gas prices are low, it's, you know, sounds like a good idea, right? And so he did that. And it didn't cause too much uproar. But now that there's been more pressure put on the oil. oil, you know, product the global oil supply because of Russia's invasion. And inflation has risen these gas prices as well. Those things, like many agreeing policies that sound really good, in practice, they have a lot of consequences that people aren't ready for and have a political

blowback for the politicians that implemented them. And speaking of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, despite the high gas prices, despite the war in Ukraine, they does. down again this week and call for even more restrictions on oil and gas production in the U.S. Yeah, I mean, I think this is one thing that a lot of maybe conservatives don't understand, which is that this is in a way part of the plan for a radical leftist. Not all Democrats, but really the radical green wing of the party wants to get entirely off of fossil fuels. They want to do it five years ago because we've already. passed, you know, kind of the deadlines in their mind for really like globally harmful impacts

of climate change. And so to them, you know, radically high gas prices that forces people to drive less is a good thing because they want people to drive less. They want everyone to switch to electric. They want these pain points to force governments to make radical quick shifts to renewable energy. So that's why you see a lot of Democrats talking not about opening up oil production, but by going, you know, 200% into renewable energy as fast as possible, because they see this as an opportunity to make a hard left turn into this kind of renewable energy economy, which does, you know, have some benefits and sounds good, but there's a lot of, you know, there's technological gaps. There's ways that we can't transport that energy to your home.

I mean, you might have solar panels in a desert somewhere gathering energy, but how do you get that to Dan McAulow's home. There's a lot of very practical problems like that that have not been solved yet, and it will take time to solve. But for the radical left part of the party, this is a great opportunity to go all in on a renewable energy economy, not to solve the problem of oil production. And just one last point on this topic,

and we've talked about this before, too, but it's an ongoing issue. It's an election year this year. Every member of the U.S. House of Representatives, is up for every seat is up for election about a third of the u.s senate um is up americans will decide in december who's going to resent represent them um in congress and of course the house democrats have a very slight majority the senate's 50 50 there's a couple of dependents in there that caucus with the democrats so it's counting them it's it's 50 50 with vice president kamala harris uh a Democrat

I'm having the tie-breaking vote. So Democrats essentially have very slim majorities in both. But let's face, inflation started after President Biden took office. These high gas prices started skyrocketing. And whether Biden's fully to blame or not, and the answer is he's not fully to blame, but certainly his policy decisions have created some of this. When Americans go to the polls,

and if this record inflation continues, if gas prices continue to be high and even go up, at least some percentage of them are going to blame it on President Biden and his party. So there's a lot at stake with this stuff. And I'm kind of surprised that the majority, the President Biden and the majorities, the slim majorities that Democrats have in the House and Senate, aren't trying to do more to bring down costs.

Last word on this topic? I think you're absolutely right. And this is kind of part of the way that politics works. I mean, I think former President Trump really took a lot of the blame for COVID. Now, whether Trump could have really done anything to prevent a global pandemic that kills a lot of people, you know, I think he couldn't have. Now, he could have maybe done a better job at handling it. But ultimately, you know, he was a big reason he was voted out of office is because there was a pandemic and people were unhappy with it. So the sitting, the incumbents always take the blame for the circumstances. that they're given. And I think Biden's in the same boat. I do agree he's at least partially to blame, if not mostly. But even for the parts he's not to blame for, he's going to take the blame because sitting presidents are ultimately responsible in the minds of the voters. All right. All right. Let's move on. You mentioned COVID. Still going to talk about COVID a little bit. While mass and many other mandates have gone away across the states as case counts have just plummeted, hospitalizations have plummeted.

There is still a mask mandate for transportation. You go to an airport, you get it on an airplane, you have to wear a mask, you get on public transportation, such as commuter trains, buses, things like that. You're still required to wear a mask. The U.S. Senate had a vote this week that maybe could change that. Tell us about that. Well, Dan, the moral of this story we're about to tell tell is that if you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk. And if you give a federal bureaucrat a regulation, he's going to extend it until the day he dies. And that's what we're seeing here is that regardless of the fact that even Democratic governors around the country have loosened or gotten rid of their mass mandates, you got a joke coming in?

I didn't know. Do my eat cookies? You never read the children's book? No, I did not. Oh, damn. This is like a prolific. Oh, man, maybe I'm out of touch here. But prolific children's book about a mouse, give him a cookie.

He always asks for something else. No matter what you give him, he always wants more. Great analogy for the modern federal government, particularly the executive branch. So. For all our four-year-old listeners. Oh, right. Right. We're in a lesson.

Sorry, Dan, this wasn't written on the stone tablets that you read as a kid. But, you know, this is an actual print children's book. All right. I always could have been there for the printing press, but we all weren't. So the, the, the, the, the, the TSA, this started when the TSA announced that they were going to extend their mask mandate for airplanes and public transit through April 18th, through April 18th, 418. So this really came as a surprise to a lot of people considering the, the CDC just announced that most Americans don't need to wear masks indoors anymore. I think people were relieved to that after the CDC announced that governors and local government. around the country, including Democrats who have been very aggressive on COVID, they lifted their

mandates or announced dates for their mandates to expire or at the very least didn't renew them with the one exception being the TSA. And so it was pretty controversial when they extended this. You know, the TSA is kind of known for strict regulations that don't do anything. The TSA is famously bad at catching any kind of terrorist or problems or anything. If you've been through the TSA, I'm sure you've taken things through that they didn't catch, even if it wasn't illegal. But now, as you said, Dan, the Senate has passed a resolution that would basically overturn this TSA extension and get rid of mask wearing on planes. If you travel out, I'm sure you're looking forward to that, probably.

So it has to still go through the House. We'll see right now it's in Nancy Pelosi's capable hands, Dan. So any predictions on where that's going to go? Yeah, it's not going to go anywhere. particularly after the Senate voted, Dr. Anthony Fauci, someone who we haven't talked about in a while. In fact, he sort of disappeared, it seemed like, for a little bit. He came out after the Senate vote and warned of another spike potentially coming, and perhaps, according to him, that there might be a need for new further restrictions, which, of course, I'm sure, in his mind would include mass.

My thought, I just think the vast majority of Americans have moved on from COVID, and I don't know how they would take new restrictions such as mask mandates. Your thoughts? Yeah, I do agree. And especially with a lot of the research showing that cloth, we've talked about this little bit, that cloth masks do little to nothing. And so a lot of people you're sitting next to auto plane, they have a cloth mask. It's really mostly just for show.

I think to use another kid's book reference that Dan won't get, there's something about Fauci and the sky falling. Someone who says the sky is always falling. And I think, or how about this, the boy who cried wolf. I think that's like a timeless myth that Dan probably knows that one. So chicken little. Chicken little. Oh, chicken little.

Yes, okay. So pulled off the gloves this morning. I think as you came at me with the. the alcoholic jokes out of the gate, so I feel no guilt. But you know, you can't cry, well, if you can't say this guy is falling for two years, Americans just kind of get over it. Maybe even if it is falling, it's like, well, okay, it's going to fall. We got to move on. You know, you can only be the doomsday profit for so long before either doomsday doesn't come or people just get tired of hearing about it. And part of that's just psychology. It's not,

it's not totally scientific response. But I think you're right. People are over it. They got COVID. they're fine now. You know, they got the vaccine probably. At a certain point, you know, you got the vaccine. And everyone knows that even though you wear this mask sometimes, there's plenty of times when you don't wear it. Or you pull it down off your face to talk to somebody. Or, you know, you're sitting, you can, on the plane,

you pull the mask down to eat your snacks for 10 minutes. And then you put the mask back on. And it just kind of seems silly. And people are, I think people are just over it. Or you walk into a restaurant with a mask on. Right. Exactly. And then you sit down and you take your mask off.

And then you eat your meal and talk and talk to the wait staff and whoever you're eating with. And then you get up after your meal and you put your mask off or put your mask back on to eight seconds to the exit. That's just, oh, my. All right. Well, I'd love the trade to jabs with you more. No pun intended. it. Yeah, but that's all the time we have. For our listeners, remember, you can find all of the Center Squares podcast at America's Talking.com. Take a look. Please subscribe. There is no cost.

For Casey Harper, I'm Dan McAulb. We will talk to you next week.