You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
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
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 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.
They can't.
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 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 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 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. That doesn't mean it's good and we like it, but there are at least four different things that are happening.
The scientists say these are all related to climate change.
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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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
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 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.
So these are the.
Different environmental factors that have led to Milton becoming a monster very quickly.
And it's still a monster.
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 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. 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.
And if you're in Sacramento and.
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 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
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.
Great most people don't have a problem with that.
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 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 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, 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 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.
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.
When the Feds.
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 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 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 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.
If you like omelets, you're gonna love it.
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 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 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 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 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.
And also the.
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 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. 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.
So it really has to do with how.
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 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.
A grocery list?
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, 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.
So they send you an omelet kit.
And if you just have a bunch of eggs and ham and peppers, maybe that's not an omelet.
But if you.
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?
And so if you don't like guns, maybe you like omelets.
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.
All right.
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, 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.
Now.
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.
People on the left love it.
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 absolutely is and has been price gouging.
There's no question about that.
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 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. 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 more incidental here happened over there.
Well, the.
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.
All of us.
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 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 flu messed things up COVID nineteen. Obviously, the war in Ukraine and those things increased the operating expenses.
Now here's a stat from the Federal Reserve.
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 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.
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 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. 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 like the evidence for it is scant at this time.
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