The Daily Signal - TOP NEWS | January CPI, Michigan State University Mass Shooting, Unidentified Objects Update, Nikki Haley Announces Presidency Bid | Feb. 14

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

On today’s Daily Signal Top News, we break down: January consumer price index was “hotter than expected” President Biden calls for action after a mass shooting at Michigan State University claimed the lives of three students an injured five other students  John Kirby says there’s no link between the Chinese Communist Party and the other three objects the U.S. military shot down  Nikki Haley announces her bid for president  Relevant Links Listen to other podcasts from The Daily Signal: https://www.dailysignal.com/podcasts/ Get daily conservative news you can trust from our Morning Bell newsletter: DailySignal.com/morningbellsubscription   Listen to more Heritage podcasts: https://www.heritage.org/podcasts Sign up for The Agenda newsletter — the lowdown on top issues conservatives need to know about each week: https://www.heritage.org/agenda Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Samantha Sherris. I'm Virginia Allen. And this is the Daily Signal top news for Tuesday, February 14th. Here are today's headlines. The Consumer Price Index, a key measure of inflation, rose 0.5% in January. Up 6.4% from January 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier today. Here to discuss is E.J. Antony, a research fellow for regional economics in the Center for Data Analysis here at the Heritage Foundation. EJ, thanks so much.

Sam, thanks for having me. Of course. Now, first and foremost, can you just break this report down for us? Was it better or worse than what we were expecting? Well, it was definitely worse than what we were expecting. But one of the key things that a lot of people don't seem to be noticing is the fact that the previous quarter, the last three months of 2022, all of those months were revised upwards. So not only were they revised upwards, but now the latest month, January, was also worse

than expected. And the reason this is concerning is because the Federal Reserve and other people, but chiefly the Federal Reserve, have been watching the latest inflation numbers to try to see what prices have been doing, which way those prices are trending. And previously, a lot of those institutions thought that those prices had stopped trending upward and were in fact beginning to trend down. But now we find out that's not the case at all. And now prices are rising just as fast in January as they were back in October. Yeah, it's interesting that you brought up the revisions because when we reported on this last month, it had shown that there was a 0.1% decrease for inflation.

And now we had to, in our report today on it, say, no, actually, it was revised that it increased 0.1%. So in the opposite direction, can you talk a little bit more about who is being impacted the most by inflation, where we saw these increases in the different categories, so to speak, for inflation? Sure. It definitely is the case that as you move down in income, you tend to get hit harder by inflation. There's a couple of reasons for that. One is you simply have less disposable income to begin with, right? It's not yachts and caviar that are driving the increases in the CPI right now. It is basic necessities. It's consumer staples. And the other key thing that's

happening now is that as people in the middle class or even lower middle class are getting so impacted by inflation. They're changing their buying habits. And so I'm not going out and buying filet mignon. I'm going out and buying more ground beef. So now what's happening is things that were disproportionately purchased by the poor, for instance, are now seeing an increase in demand because other income stratas are now buying those things more often. And that's, that increase in demand is causing the price to go up even further above and beyond inflation. And in a lot of parts of the United States, it's winter, it's February still. So can you speak to what we're seeing in terms of with this report, the price of energy? What did we see there? Well, with it being winter,

I mean, it's about 20% more to heat your home this winter as compared to last winter. And so, you're talking about people who are already strapped for cash, right? Not just the poor, but everyone. You're seeing people putting groceries on credit cards and being unable to pay that off at the end of every month. And now on top of that, they're going to probably have to do the same thing with their heating source. It doesn't matter whether it's electricity, natural gas, home heating oil, whatever the case may be. Do you predict that we'll continue to see inflation heading in this direction, or do you think Americans might feel some relief in the near future? No, I think it's going to be a real struggle for the Federal Reserve to bring inflation

down significantly from where we are at right now for a couple of reasons. One, there's still trillions of dollars in excess cash in the economy. In other words, there's way too much liquidity out there. And a lot of that is because that there's just too much borrowing by the federal government. And as long as Congress and the Fed are working at cross purposes, in other words, as long as Congress keeps borrowing all this money we don't have, it makes it that much harder for the Fed to take out that same amount of liquidity from the economy. And so as long as there's that conflict, I think we're going to really, really struggle to bring inflation down.

Well, EJ, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about the Consumer Price Index. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. President Biden is calling for action today after a deadly shooting at Michigan State University Monday night. In a statement released earlier today, Biden said, too many American communities have been devastated by gun violence. I have taken action to combat this epidemic in America, including a historic number of executive

actions and the first significant gun safety law in nearly 30 years. But we must do more. Three students were killed and five other students are still recovering. Biden also said, action is what we owe to those grieving today in Michigan and across America. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer tweeted earlier. today, too many of us scan rooms for exits when we enter. Many have gone through the grim exercise of figuring out who would be our last call. Last night, kids at MSU made those calls. They worried for their lives, their friends, their fellow Spartans. We can't keep living like

this. Amy Swearer is a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and she has a different view. Amy wrote on Twitter, gun control ink will certainly turn this into a call to just do something, where none of those things would have actually prevented a 43-year-old with no legal disqualifications from obtaining a handgun and murdering people in a gun-free zone. Swear added, meanwhile, they will, with almost equal certainty, ignore the most fundamentally important factors at play here, a man descending into mental and emotional, emotional crisis with what appears to be, according to other sources, a limited support system,

and receiving no real help. The shooting occurred just one day prior to the fifth anniversary of the shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School that claimed 17 lives. We have talked previously about the Chinese spy balloon and the three other objects that the U.S. military shot down over the last week and a half. According to John Kirby, National Security Council spokesman, there's no need to panic about the three unidentified objects. Kirby told reporters that we haven't seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of the PRC's spying program or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts. The U.S. military shot down a Chinese spy balloon

off the South Carolina coast back on February 4th, two days after it was first reported and following a slew of criticism against the Biden administration for its delayed action. After that incident, the U.S. military also shot down three more objects on February 10th in Alaska, the third object on February 11th in Canada, and the fourth object on February 12th over Michigan, ABC News reports. General Mark Millie also told reporters that the first shot missed second shot hit the object shut down over Michigan. He added, we go to great lengths to make sure that the airspace is clear and the backdrop is clear up to the max effective range of the missile. And in this case, the missiles land or the missile landed harmlessly in the water of Lake Huron.

Well, it's official. Nikki Haley is running for president. Haley made the announcement this morning. She previously served as the governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017. Haley is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and she served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under the Trump administration before stepping down in 2018. Let's take a listen to some of Haley's campaign video via her Twitter. The railroad tracks divided the town by race. I was the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. Not black, not white. I was different.

But my mom would always say your job is not to focus on the differences, but the similarities. And my parents reminded me and my siblings every day how blessed we were to live in America. Some look at our past as evidence that America's founding principles are bad. They say the promise of freedom is just made up. think our ideas are not just wrong, but racist and evil. Nothing could be further from the truth. Haley is the second Republican candidate to throw her hat in the ring. Former President Donald Trump announced his third bid for the White House on November 15th. Less than two years ago, Haley said she would not run if Trump did and that she would talk to him about it. But as of

today, Haley is officially running against former President Donald Trump for the presidency in And that all due it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to The Daily Signal's Top News. If you haven't had the chance already, be sure to check out our morning show here in this podcast feed where we interview lawmakers, experts, and leading conservative voices. Join us tomorrow morning for the Daily Signal interview edition. I'm going to be sitting down with Suparnadatta. She's a mother from Virginia who was recently lost her seat on the Virginia Board of Education after she praised the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. She joins me on the show to explain what happened and why she thinks she was turned away from the board.

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