Harris Ignores Supply & Feeds Demand

sort of corrected themselves. And while poles had been showing Harris leading in all these swing states and Harris leading nationally by maybe two or three points, now things are sort of correcting and it's nationally looking more like a

dead heat. And if it's a genuine dead heat, just because of the sort of inefficient spread of the Democrat elect across the states, it's a if it winds up being, you know, forty eight percent to forty eight percent, Donald Trump usually winds up winning in that case, just because basically, Donald Trump Democrats have such a large share of the vote in large in California basically that that skews the percentages such that Trump is more likely to win the

electoral College in the event of a tied race from a popular vote perspective. So anyway, it looks like things are sort of stabilizing for Trump, and Democrats have had some bad press, a lot of bad press about Tim Walls, and Harris is finally having to actually give some policy proposals. But here's her problem is that she can't really escape the fact that she is the current sitting vice president.

And you know when she says stuff like we're going to tackle inflation on day one, well it's day He's been the vice president for three and a half years. It is she could introduce these things tomorrow. What's to stop her. She could have introduced these things two weeks ago. She has to sort of engage with the fact that she is, in fact the current vice president. They're trying to sort of recreate this notion that she isn't the incumbent who should be responsible for the economic malaise in

which the country finds itself. Now, one of the first things she is doing is going after high prices of groceries, and she is reiterating the same thing that Joe Biden has reiterated over the course of the last three and a half years, when gas prices shot up, Biden tried to claim, and he got a bunch of state attorneys general to acclaim, Oh, this is this is the fault of evil gas companies just gouging us at the pump. That's what's responsible. It's these companies that own gas stations

that are gouging you at the pump. That's why our price of gas is going up without sort of acknowledging. Well, no, there are genuine economic factors that are leading to the cost of oil skyrocketing. Okay, it's not like, you know, California liberals do this all the time, where they're like, oh, these oil companies are gouging us, wires are or why is our gas price so much more expensive here in California. It's like, well, this is not a mystery. California imposes

tons of specific state taxes on gasoline. California has all kinds of mandates for the specific California mix of gasoline that we have to get at our pumps to comply with California state emissions regulations, which are a different mix than what you're pumping into your car in Texas or Oklahoma. Or Nevada or something. So that requires gas companies to set up separate refinery set ups a separate refinery system just for California. So that adds on lots of additional cost.

Like California having the most expensive gas in the nation is not a kuinkie dink. It's the result of a bunch of very conscious, deliberate policy choices California has made over the course of decades. It's not like gas companies are only evil price gouging monsters in California, but not in Nevada, where all of a sudden you cross the border and magically the gas is eighty cents a gallon

cheaper whatever. It is a dollar a gallon cheaper. No, it's a dollar a gallon, eighty cents a gallon whatever, more expensive here for reasons, for very distinct, concrete reasons. So what Kamala Harris is trying to say is, ah, the reason, oh, inflation is so bad because because these evil supermarket chains are price gouging you. That's what's happening. Evil supermarket chains are price gouging. Now, that is ridiculous. Supermarkets are not price gouging us. Okay, supermarkets in America

operate on an extremely narrow profit margin. Supermarkets operate on a profit margin industry wide of about one point six percent. That's a really narrow profit margin. Right, So when a supermarket chain is increasing its prices on food, that's not price gouging. Okay, Look, if supermarket chains had a you know, five or a ten percent profit margin, okay, maybe we can talk. Maybe we can talk about whether or not they're price caudging it or if certain rest supermarket chains

we're doing So that's fine. But Harris is trying to promote this idea, and she's promoting it along with the idea of price controls. Price controls for food, so putting artificial caps on food costs in ways that putting artificial caps on the costs of different kinds of food, so that the cost of food cannot fluctuate freely in response to market trends, that grocery stores supermarkets cannot price food

at a way that is reflective of the market. That basically the government will come in and impose a top limit on how much you can charge for certain kinds of items. Now, I am not never have been a total laissez fair economic thinker. I don't know that the invisible hand of the market always results in the best outcome. I'm not you know, I don't believe that is true. I think that some government regulation of the economy is okay.

Everyone kind of thinks that. Okay. If you think things like monopolies are things that should be broken up, you know, then you don't believe in a purely invisible hand of the market controlling everything. And we've very widely accepted a left, right and center in America that things like monopolies and anti competitive activity are things that should be resistant. But price controls are such a terrible idea. Okay, again, you've got supermarkets are operating on a one point six percent

profit margin. Let's take any individual item, all right, Let's take mayonnaise. All right. We'll just use mayonnaise as an example. Let's say mayonnaise costs. The cost to the supermarket to buy the mayonnaise from the suppliers from the mayonnaise company is two dollars a jar, and they want to sell it for two dollars and twenty cents. If the government tells the supermarket chain, you can only sell your mayonnaise at two dollars a jar, there's two dollars a jar

price control limit on mayonnaise. Well, the supermarket will then look at the mayonnaise say well, we have to spend two dollars just to get the mayonnaise. If we are then selling the mayonnaise for two dollars, we're making zero money. In fact, we're probably losing money. We're losing money once you account for the cost of overhead employees, air conditioning, et cetera. So we will lose money on every jar of mayonnaise we sell. What is the supermarket gonna do.

They're gonna just stop selling mayonnaise, right, I mean, that's obviously what's gonna happen. So when you impose a price control, what tends to happen is not that the company just sort of statically says.

they just fire their big wig executives. Okay, yeah, I guess they could do that too, But it's just not a sustainable It's inherently not a sustainable thing to just mandate an artificial some kind of artificial price control that is not reflective of the economic reality of the product that you're wanting people to sell. We want grocery stores to sell bread, meat, poultry, dairy. Okay, this is not you know, we're not talking here about you know, birthday

cakes or floral arrangements. We're talking about food. We're talking about a basic staple, basic necessary products that people have to get. Okay, the cost of all of those things is going up. Bread, even just bread, like loads of sandwich bread. My wife and I have noticed how crazily more expensive bread is, bread, milk, eggs, meat, The cost of meat nowadays, even just to get like ground beef, it's absurdly expensive, absurdly more expensive than it was three

years ago to an extent that it's unavoidable. But some kind of price control is not going to be the answer. Some kind of price control you're going to force eventually. What price controls do? Government imposed price controls that aren't reflective of where the market is. Usually these market realities

are reflective of something real. If you accept this fiction that Harris is perpetrating or perpetuating rather that people are spending more at the grocery stores because evil Costco and Evil Walmart and evil Save Martin, Evil Vaughans and evil you know, Kroger, whatever, that they're all price gouging you. If you accept that fiction, then sure price controls make sense. But if you live in reality and see that their profit margins are very narrow and the reason they're increasing

their price has to do with factors outside of their control. Inflation, too much money in the economy, the purchasing power of your money is devalued. And I guess the Harris team is just trying to continue on with this idea. Oh, we've stopped it. We've stopped aggressive inflation. Inflation's only going up by two percent each year. Okay, it went up though way more than that. A couple of years ago,

and we're still suffering the ill effects of it. It's like saying I've got my weight under control, because you know, in two thousand, I gained two pounds. In twenty twenty one, though I gained a pounds, and in twenty twenty two I gained another eight pounds. But twenty twenty three I only gained two pounds, and twenty twenty four I only gained two pounds. Yeah, I'm still way too fat. Okay, I'm still put on what is that fifteen to sixteen pounds over the last four years. I'm not as healthy

as I was. I'm still fat. We're not reversing inflation. We're not making those prices go down. It's gonna take a long time to smooth this out, but government enforced price controls are not gonna be the answer here. When we return, we'll talk about a couple of other insane economic ideas from the Harris Camp subsidizing home purchasing and subsidizing demand rather than supply. That is next on the

John Girardi Show. One of the things that's real characteristic of the Democrat's economic policy, and we see it reflected in a recent proposal by Kamala Harris. She's talking about giving new home buyers twenty five thousand dollars for the purchase of a new home, and this seems to be directly in response to critiques from JD. Vance, who, by the way, has been absolutely killing it. And I've been really enjoying his performance, as you know, the vice presidential

candidate over the last several weeks. He's been incredibly active, incredibly aggressive. He's been the best surrogate Trump has had over the last few weeks or so. After a little bit of a rough start when he was introduced, I think he's actually shown himself to be a real asset

to President Trump. Vance has been continually critiquing how difficult it is to purchase a home for young first time home buyers and making the argument that the Biden Harris policies have made it harder, that inflation has made it harder. Increasing home prices have been driven by lots of economic decisions made by the Biden Harris team. Now, I would probably say he is likely painting a slightly overly simplistic

picture of this. I think there have been a lot of economic forces over the last thirty years that have conspired to make new home purchasing for millennials and Gen Z incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible, certainly much more difficult than it was for Baby Boomers when they were purchasing their homes. But as far as even as far as not even talking about inflation adjusted dollars, well, yes,

actually talking about inflation adjusted dollars. The cost of a new home for Baby boomers purchasing homes in the seventies was much cheaper in real dollars of inflation adjusted dollars than it is for young people today. So Harris is feeling the need to respond to this critique from Vance, and she does this classic liberal reaction, which is, well, we can't. We're not gonna fix anything that's wrong on the supply side. We're just gonna subsidize demand. Subsidizing demand

the ultimate liberal answer to everything. We're not going to make the cost of goods go down. We're gonna give you extra money, you know, like like the cod during COVID. No. No, we're not gonna let you actually work. We're just gonna give you all one thousand dollars. You know, We're not gonna help you actually earn more. No, we're just gonna give you a handout. We're not gonna fix the problem

on the supply side. We're not gonna do stuff to make the real dollar value cost of home of homes go down, make it easier somehow to purchase homes by whether it's helping you have more earning power or having the actual costs of homes go down. No, no, no, no no. We're gonna subsidize the demand instead. We're not going to fix the supply. We're not gonna build more homes. We're not going to fix the supply side of it. We're going to subsidize the demand. We'll give you a

handout to pay for demand. And that's the Democrat recipe for all kinds of things. In California, we have all these homeless people. We cannot build housing for them. It's way too expensive because California makes too expensive. Okay, do we amend our laws to make that less expensive. Nope, we just subsidize the demand. We'll just give you a bunch of government handouts for building quote certified California low income housing. You know, like we're we're trying to build

that here in Fresno. We've got some big project that's going up near Blackstone and Shaw for a big low income housing unit. Each one of the units is going to cost four hundred and twenty five thousand dollars per unit to build. That's not low income housing. That's that's like my house costs. That probably costs around there. We bought it for less than that, but the probably that's what my house costs, you know, a nice decently sized

house in Clovis. You know, we've heard stories about, like I think Riverside was building a low income housing unit cost them a million dollars per unit. And the only reason to developers can build stuff like that is because California is given them a subsidized, you know, taxpayer subsidized handout to build it. So we're not going to fix the supply side of it. We're just going to subsidize the demand. So Harris is saying, Okay, oh, we got a program for first time home buyer. We've got a

program for home buyers. We'll give everyone twenty five grand, twenty five grand to buy their home. Without thinking through the idea, a twenty five thousand dollars subsidy for first time home buyers without thinking through, Hey, don't you think that maybe if you're giving a home buyer twenty five thousand dollars for a purchase of a home, that that's just going to lead to home sellers just pricing these homes more and more expensive, maybe about twenty five thousand

dollars more expensive. If the seller no ohs that the buyer has twenty five thousand in effectively free money coming to him or her, why wouldn't they just jack up the price by that much. This is what colleges and universities have done for years. Again, another classic example of Democrats subsidizing the demand rather than fixing the supply. Here's colleges and universities with high tuition costs. The democrats solution is, well,

we'll just give free money. We'll just give out more and more and more funny money student loans to more and more students, and we'll just continue to make it available. And then the colleges and universities look at the federal government doing this and said, okay, well will they give out if we set our tuition at fifty thousand dollars a year? Will the federal government give them loans enough

to cover that cost? Yes, we will if we set our tuition cost at sixty thousand dollars a year, Will the federal government, you know, will the federal government fund student loans to account for a sixty thousand dollars per year tuition. Of course we will. Seventy thousand, of course

we will. Eighty thousand, of course we will. That's why college tuition has gone up so much, because the federal government is feeding the demand, subsidizing the demand, not doing anything to address the supply side, not doing anything to have colleges and universities charge less for tuition, not addressing that problem. So it's a classic example. Harris is just doing example after example after example of either artificially setting price controls on the supply in ways that aren't addressing

the actual economic reality, or just subsidizing the demand. It's completely inept economically, and I think it's just pandering. When we return more on the different factors that are making housing costs go up and why a twenty five thousand dollars handout is not going to fix that next on the John Girardi Show. So there are a lot of

reasons why housing costs have gone up. Kamala Harris is trying to respond to jd Vance's critiques of this by talking about, well, here's a twenty five thousand dollars handout to new home buyers without thinking through, hey, don't you think home sellers are just going to price things about

twenty five thousand dollars more expensive? Now? I saw kind of an interesting post by this author, Anthony Eaeselin, whom I like to read quite a bit, and he has an interesting little post about why are housing prices more? And he gives a lot of different reasons, and I thought a lot of them were interesting, and it's tough for us to think about. And I think the problem is so much of our public policy is so hyper focused on just a few different factors and sees only

a few different solutions. Okay, well, we can't address you know, various kinds of environmental law policy in California because that's kind of a sacred cow that we don't want to touch. So you know, if we do, then the Sierra Club will get mad, and big Democrat donors who fund the Zerra Club will get mad. So so we won't address that.

So we'll just do something that we'll just feed the demand. Okay, well, we'll just give more you know subsidies for first time home buyers without realizing giving more subsidies to first time home buyers is just feeding the beast. That's just going to prompt people to price it up more and more and more because they know that they've got this supply of ready money. Now, here's a lot of the different factors for why people want bigger houses, why housing is

so expensive. So the first is shifting trends in American social life. There's been a shift over the last thirty years of people wanting bigger, wanting houses that are bigger per person, okay, wanting a bedroom for every kid, wanting lots of bathrooms. Household sizes, though, are smaller, so you

have more buyers for roughly the same population. Maybe forty years ago you had bigger family sizes, the population didn't grow that much, but the number of buyers grew tremendously, So the number of households increased, but the total population didn't increase that much. The number of buyers just increased disproportionately to the population as a whole. So you have more buyers for roughly the same amount of people, so

you need more houses. So that's putting a strain on the need for more houses, more demand cost goes up. Related to that, you have more single people. You have a lot more unmarried adults today. Later and later and later on in life, people are getting married later. People are staying single at higher percentages than they were thirty years ago. More single people equals more households, more separate households. Okay, you've got you know, two thirty year old single people

as opposed to a married couple who are both aged thirty. Well, the married couple age thirty would buy one house, and the two single thirty year olds they're buying two houses. Zoning laws. Zoning laws prevent a natural and healthy variety of houses and businesses to occupy a neighborhood. So all kinds of zoning regulations within American municipalities restrict the ability to build multi unit dwellings over here. That's the great bugaboo of nimbiism, not in my backyardism. We don't want

to have a mixture of businesses and housing. The idea of building it's rare to see, you know, apartment complexes built on top of storefronts anymore. So we have zoning that really restricts the kinds of building we can do. It's like, Nope, this is commercial over here and this is residential over here. No, it can't be mixed commercial residential,

et cetera. Social dysfunction. Social dysfunction causes generally responsible people to flee from the generally irresponsible, which makes everything worse, not just different neighborhoods, but separating themselves on the basis of school districts, et cetera. School districts play a huge part in this. So the distinctly American set up for

how our public schools work. And it's so funny to me how by the way, liberals who crow about the importance of public schools and how bad homeschooling is because it's abandoning this very important public, civic institution of public schools, and they decry sort of the elitism of sending kids to private schools or fail are similarly the people most opposed to, you know, school choice measures vouchers letting families choose which school district to go to, as opposed to Nope,

you geographically live in this district, you gotta go to this district. Sorry, No, if sands or butts, you're locked into this geographic location. It's the very same liberals who get upset at sort of you know, the north south economic divide that we see in Fresno. Why do you think there is a north south economic divide? It's largely because of this set up, the lack of school choice

in the Fresno area. The fact that California doesn't have school choice options, doesn't have vouchers, doesn't give parents the freedom to take a voucher, take their kids education money, and use it to go to either a private school or a school in Clovis Unified versus a school in Presne Unified. That has led to the growing divergence in quality between Clovis Unified and Fresney Unified. As far as

economic outcomes, that is precisely what's fed that beast. So these local liberals who get so upset about, you know, the North south econ, you know, socioeconomic divide, what do you think is fostering that? More than anything? It's public

school districts. My whole life growing up, all I heard on the radio were ads from real estate developers building you know, new homes starting oh in the highly acclaimed Close Unified school district, the highly acclaimed Clovis Unified School district, the highly acclaimed Clothes Unified School District, which it became a running joke in our family that yeah, who was acclaiming it? Yeah, it was the Builders and Clothes Unified, the best of two school districts in Fresno. But again,

why do we think that was happening. It's because of the setup of public school districts. So school districts lead to greater economic inequalities and lead to increased prices as more and more wealthy people self concentrate in the better

school district versus the worst school district. So there's a lot of stuff that is leading and that reality of you know, whether or not you are in Clovis Unified School District makes a big, noticeable, discernible dollar amount difference in the cost of a home in the greater Fresno area. If you cross the boundary line from President Unified to Clovis Unified, that house is going to cost x amount more.

It just is plain and simple. If we had educational choice, if we had educational freedom, where you know, you gave the parents the student's education funding from the state and told the parents, all right, well take this money wherever you want. And I think you could see a smoothing of things between Fresno Unified and Clovis Unified. I think

there wouldn't be such a massive distinction. And I think you could see more people buying more houses in central Fresno, in South Fresno rather than just all in Clovis or in North Fresno. You could see, you know, living within the Clovis Unified School district would not be something that makes the cost of living there, you know, twenty thirty forty fifty thousand dollars more expensive for the price of a home than a house than an identical house that's

you know, one block over and in Fresno Unified. So there are so many fact and by the way that this is the other aspect with housing, what do we see in California. The only things you can see this in Fresno. You look around at what kinds of actual homebuilding are happening, and it's basically at the two ends

of the spectrum. You see a lot of multi unit like condos, apartments or something that are clearly very high end, or you see state subsidized quote lower income housing, registered trademark.

What you don't see is a lot of new construction in the middle you don't see stuff that, hey, here's a home that costs two hundred and fifty thousand dollars that a family of four can afford with you know, maybe a median with a household income of maybe around you know, ninety thousand dollars per year that you know, maybe they could save up and afford a down payment. No, we don't have any of that. There's nothing for middle class families. Most of the new construction it's either super

high end stuff or low income housing. Where we get into you know, it's going to be Section eight and there's subsidies and blah blah blah blah blah. But the middle class is just getting completely hollowed out. Why because

for builders it's way too expensive to build. It's too expensive to build if you don't think you're going to get either one government subsidy, which you're only going to get government subsidies for low income housing registered trademark, or if you know you can charge really high rents or sell for a lot on the back end. Because why well, cost of construction materials has gone up, Risks of environmental lawsuits are hanging over you. You have to account for

that risk zoning issues. Is this that it's really really expensive to build, and it's too expensive to build in a way that would satisfy a middle class family. So there are a lot of factors that are leading to the cost of homes going up. And you can see this is the unseriousness of the Harris campaign to sort of say, oh, twenty five thousand dollars for first time home buyers. That's not gonna cut it. That's a band

aid at best. It's a twenty five thousand dollars. Oh so, just to make the cost of the home increase by twenty five thousand. Again, the Democrat approach to this problem is subsidizing the demand. It's not ever anything about fixing the supply, looking at the underlying issues with the supply and correcting them. When we return, a sad farewell to Foster Freeze. The Foster Freeze in Clovis near Old Town.

That's next on the John Girardi Show. A melancholy happy Trails to the Foster's Freeze, located at Clovis Avenue and Ninth Street in Clovis. Since the advent of twenty dollars per hour minimum wage, several different Foster Freeze locations in the San Joaquin Valley have gone out of business. This is the third Foster Freeze in the Greater Fresno area to have gone out of business. There was another Foster Freeze in Lamore that went out of business. This is

the latest casualty and this one hurts for me. I know it hurts from my buddy Steve Darnell. This has been kind of an institution in Clovis for decades. It's been around for decades and for me just going to my church to in Clovis, basically I drive past it every single time I go to church, and it was always my landmark for Okay, I go down Close Avenue and then go to Olph and turn on to Ninth Street and then go down ninth Street to Dewitten. There I am at church. So it's a really sad thing.

And I think what's happening is for these kind of franchise restaurants like Fosters Freeze, which is not a huge national franchise. I think it's kind of a California specific franchise. They can't afford a massive, you know, all FRANCHISEE wide touch screen system like Taco Bell or McDonald's can support. And basically, I think what's happening with these faster restaurants is unless you've got enough volume that you can scape by, you either fire employees and put in touch screens or

you go out of business. And that seems more and more to be happening. So it's just it's tough. I think, between inflation and the twenty dollars an hour minimum wage, they just aren't They can't make money, and these businesses go out of business. And that's a sad thing. Is the twenty dollar an hour minimum wage actually helping people that'll do it For John Dirolady Show, see next time on Power Talk