I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, a day away from politics and mass media with people you love and who love you back. It's really a spiritual spa treatment. That's the idea. We ought to do it more than a couple of times a year, but we are back and now that we are, an obvious observation: All prosperity in this country depends ultimately on energy. Our consumer economy runs on it.
It takes energy to make things and bring them to your house. Our tech economy runs on energy too, a lot of it. How do you think they keep their server farms running? Energy is pretty much, in fact the key, to everything that Americans do for a living. It's the key to health care and agriculture and yes, media and travel and construction, entertainment—even finance, which is symbiotic with the real economy, depends in the end on energy, because you can't lend money to businesses if they no longer exist and if energy prices go up high enough, they don't exist.
Given how central, very obviously central, energy is to everything that matters in America, it's hard to believe that the Biden administration would intentionally make energy much more expensive, because we know for a fact, having seen it repeatedly through history, that high energy prices will crush our economy faster even than the COVID lockdowns did. People will become poor. Some of them will die. That's not a guess. It will happen. Given all that, it's unimaginable that anyone but our enemies would want to raise our energy prices to the point where our economy collapses and yet that is exactly what the Biden administration has decided to do and to do it, they're using twin instruments of climate policy and their war against Russia.
The effect? In a nation with the largest recoverable oil reserves on planet Earth, many Americans can no longer afford fossil fuels and once again, this is not an accident. It's not a natural cycle we're going through. Politicians and policymakers are doing it to us on purpose. Now that the midterm elections are over, the media can finally begin to cover the inevitable result of these policies. CNN, for example, just ran an article about Americans who are worried about freezing to death over the winter in America.
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One 63-year-old woman in Philadelphia called Charmaine Johnson said that she is torn between heating her home and buying food and of course, she's choosing food because she has no choice. "It's miserable," she said. "It's like living in an igloo." Another man, a 67-year-old man called Tim Wiseley said he turns on his heat only when his teeth begin to chatter. "You can't go food shopping and get oil. It's one or the other," he said. "It's a horrible feeling. It's a feeling I wouldn't wish on anyone." It's a feeling that Americans have not had in generations.
These are American citizens living in a major American city that used to be considered first world and they can't afford heat and it's happening not just in Philadelphia, but everywhere. Average home heating prices went up 17% last year and they're up another 18% this year. Again, not organic. This is the result of policies from the Biden administration and its allies, not just in the Congress, but in think tanks across Washington and in the entire American news media. This did not happen by accident. As FOX Business has reported, once winter arrives, the problem is going to get much worse.
FOX BUSINESS: We're riding around with Oil for Less and they say that their customers are struggling to keep up with these skyrocketing costs. Across the board, heating costs are expected to be high this winter. Heating oil in particular, up 68% year over year. Today, they filled up this tank with about $950 worth of home heating oil. A year ago, the same amount of oil would have cost them closer to $600. That's why the company tells me that some customers are just doing without.
MAN: People have gone without hot water and heat for a week just because they haven't had the money to call me and say, "Hey, come on in."
They don't have the money for hot water or heat. Again, what country is this? Any country that can't provide hot water or heat in the winter isn't much of a country and again, it doesn't need to be this way because we have the largest recoverable oil reserves on the planet. What happens when energy costs continue to rise? Well, people run out of money and it doesn't take long. According to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, households are spending their cash reserves far faster than anyone all those economists projected, even as credit card debt reaches historic levels.
If you're borrowing money for household expenses on your credit card at exorbitant rates, you're done. As Business Insider reported, "Americans have already burned through a third of their pent up savings. That's nearly three times more than previously thought and signals spending will soon slow down."
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Yeah, that's what happens when people run out of money. They stop spending it because they don't have it and then the consumer economy slows. When energy costs rise again (Just to be clear, because it's not sophisticated economics here) when they rise, so does the price of everything else. The first staple to rise in cost is the one that you have to have and that's food. Watch.
CNN: On the menu this year for Thanksgiving: rising prices. Overall, prices are up 7.7% from last year and grocery prices are more than 12% higher than a year ago. Here's what it means for the family grocery bill as you shop for the big day. First, the turkey. Per pound prices for turkey are up 17% year over year. An average frozen turkey costs roughly $2.38 a pound. That's up from $1.74. Now, you can blame the avian flu outbreaks and higher fuel, feed and labor costs because of inflation running near 40-year highs. What about eggs? Eggs cost 43% more than a year ago. Butter and margarine are up 34%. Flour is up nearly 25%. Your pies are going to cost more to make. These higher prices could potentially change Thanksgiving plans.
Why is this happening? Well, you heard the reporter allude to it, but not really explain it. There are, of course, many factors, but there are two big factors that are driving this, driving inflation, and the rising cost of everything around you and they are in order: global warming policy and the war in Ukraine. Now, as it always does, the left used people's best instincts, compassion and care for the planet, to subvert them into supporting these two lunatic policies. If you care about people, you support the war in Ukraine. If you care about the planet, you support global warming policy, but of course, neither one of these was about what they said it was about. Both of them were designed to spike energy costs, to increase the control of the people currently in charge, and to enrich their donors.
If you wanted to fix this, the very first thing you would do if you wanted to help the American middle class, would be to force a cease fire in Ukraine. That would help the world and it would help our middle class. Then you would encourage more domestic energy production because we have the domestic energy. Then you would take a look at the trillions we have spent on renewable energy, solar panels, electric cars and wind power. This has made a small group of people incredibly rich, but it has put our grid in per and it has raised the cost of energy beyond the reach of middle-class Americans, but the Biden administration is not looking for solutions, just the opposite. They're looking for ways to squeeze a few more dollars out of an increasingly impoverished American middle class.
According to Bloomberg, this week, "the (IRS) says more auditors and upgraded technology could help raise as much as $1 trillion." Oh, so you have less money and they plan to take more. If that's not an act of hostility, what is? It is an act of hostility. They don't like you and they're not hiding it, but big picture, every other major company in America is laying people off, but the IRS somehow, thanks to Joe Manchin, the moderate from West Virginia, the IRS somehow has the dough to hire 87,000 new employees and they're coming for you. They didn't hire those people by accident. They hired them to take more of your money.
Businesses who have to forecast for a living have seen this coming and they're preparing to cut workers and so what this looks like, if you take three steps back, is an economic death spiral. Ahead of Christmas shopping season, when Amazon usually adds employees, Amazon is now laying off employees, a lot of them. 10,000 people were laid off from Amazon and the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is actually encouraging people, his customers, not to buy his products. Watch this.
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BEZOS: The economy does not look great right now. Things are slowing down. You're seeing layoffs in many, many sectors of the economy. People are slowing down. The probability, say if we're not in a recession right now, we're likely to be in one very soon. If you're an individual and you're thinking about buying a new, you know, large screen TV, maybe slow that down. Keep that cash. See what happens. Same thing with a refrigerator or a new car or whatever. This takes some risk off the table. If you're a small business, maybe delay some capital purchases. Do you really need that new piece of equipment? Maybe it can wait a little bit. Have some cash on hand. Just a little bit of risk reduction could make the difference for that small business if we do get into even more serious economic problems. So, you got to play the probabilities a little bit.
Wait, so the guy who sells big screen TVs on the internet is telling his customers, the source of his personal wealth, not to buy big screen TVs off the internet, really? That's how worried he is. He actually, for maybe the first time ever, is caring about you. That's quite amazing and he's not the only one. Bezos is not the only one who's worried that something bad is about to happen to our economy, the global economy.
In October, the IMF warned that 2023 will bring a recession for most of the world. That same month, the CEO of JPMorgan, the country's biggest bank, Jamie Dimon, said a recession is almost certain in the coming months. So, what do you do to avert a disaster? Well, you probably can't stop it. You should know what its outlines will look at. Take a look at the housing market if you want to know. Home sales are at their lowest level in a decade.
As the Fed raises interest rates to fight inflation, mortgages become too expensive, but if the Fed were to cut interest rates, home prices would go up along with inflation. You see the problem here? We've reached the end of monetary policy ability to tweak our economy. So, faced with all of this, the one thing you'd hope is to have an administration that understands what the problem is. It might at least be interested in fixing it and taking care of the middle-class people who don't have a margin.
People who are on the bottom, there are always the subject of our concern. What we do about the homeless? What do you with people who make $80,000 in the New York suburbs? Nobody cares about them. Here's Joe Biden explaining the straight face that actually everything's fine. His economic plan is working.
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BIDEN: Folks, my economic plan is showing results. People are starting to feel it. We're making progress on bringing down inflation without losing jobs. Folks are seeing much needed break in inflation at the grocery store as we head in the holidays.
That's pathetic and everyone knows it's pathetic and maybe the only upside of the Biden administration is that there's really no lying at this point. This isn't working. They just did better than expected in the midterms, the Democratic Party, unfortunately, but we're now facing the next election in 2024 and no sane person wants Joe Biden to run because everybody gets that this is unsustainable. Even the media gets that at this point. The question is: who replaces Joe Biden and what can that person do about the disaster that his administration?
