S*#t You Need To Know: What Can You Do With A Dollar?

It's a wake-up call in more ways than one.

Time for some shit you need to know.

Well if you remember yesterday we talked about the president floating the idea of getting rid of the federal gas tax for a little while and we talked about how it was about 18 and a half cents and was that ever gonna really make a difference to anybody and the president said well you know money is money which is true and we figured it would just skate through well that's not

really the case congressional leaders are pumping the brakes on the president's plan to suspend the federal gasoline tax they're wary of taking a political gamble with relatively little payoff for americans at the pump so where does the gamble come from and why are we not going to really be affected well i told you 18 cents a gallon is not going to make that big a deal when gas is at five bucks republicans and democrats alike though are agreeing on this they said yesterday that they're open to the idea of temporarily

the 18 cent per gallon tax and that they'll discuss the possibility over coming days but at the same time one day after Trump's call to action more than two months into the Middle East war that's caused these prices for fuel both gasoline diesel everything to shoot way up congressional leaders were not throwing any weight behind legislative proposals they're preferring instead to wait and see whether Trump will make a more direct appeal to Congress which as far as

It goes, he needs to.

He can't unilaterally decide, not that that has stopped him before, but he cannot unilaterally decide.

I'm sorry.

My tongue is not cooperating with me this morning.

And that's a sentence you probably don't usually hear from people, but it's true.

So anyway, they're gonna wait and see.

Because, like I said, he can't just decide to drop the tax.

He needs congressional approval for that.

So Mike Johnson, the man who usually bends over backwards to do exactly what Donald Trump said, came out yesterday and said that it is certainly an intriguing idea, which is corporate speak for, yeah, we'll not be doing that.

But hey, interesting idea, no stupid questions.

Yes.

So Mike Johnson said, like I said, it's an intriguing idea, but that Republicans have to wait to assess and consider potential unintended consequences before they move forward with the bill.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise from Louisiana, he helped set the chamber's calendar, did not promise a vote on the issue.

So on Monday, leaders said,

Leaders were said to be discussing how to proceed according to people familiar with the discussions who were granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Now the trepidation for now to lift the federal gasoline tax underscores what Republican leaders are worried about and directly confronting.

the Iran Wars impacts, and marks the latest flashpoint in Congress' broader efforts to address energy affordability, that's one of the biggest issues that is framing the midterms.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers have pitched bills to temporarily suspend the gasoline tax.

Many of their colleagues have questioned whether it would make much of a difference.

I don't believe so.

I'm wondering how you would feel about that.

It is not.

Further complicating the gas tax holidays path forward are concerns about the beleaguered highway trust fund.

That is what is paid for mostly by the gasoline tax.

Now, pending a gasoline tax holiday legislation, pending gasoline tax holiday legislation would make up the difference with general fund dollars for the highway.

fund, but it would likely encounter resistance from fiscal Republicans who are worried about the deficit.

Yes.

So it sounded really good in the short term and any, anytime we hear, oh, we're going to cut a tax, we get all excited.

Don't we?

Yeah.

Oh, that'll be great.

I don't have to pay a tax.

So gasoline is going to be what, 295 again.

No, it's still gonna be way over four dollars.

It still may actually be over five dollars in some places, but it'll be 18 cents cheaper 18 cents now Parker I'm old enough to remember when it if I had 18 cents when I was a kid I could walk up to Ben Franklin and get 18 pieces of penny candy You know what I can get with 18 cents now bubkus nada zero nothing nothing nothing

I can't even pay a toll with 18 cents.

I can't go to a lemonade stand on the corner with some young child.

Uh, not that I would take a young child to a lemonade stand, but you know, uh, lemonade stand being run by a young child and by a cooling beverage for 18 cents.

Can't do it.

18 cents means nothing.

And again,

short.

Yeah.

I don't even know what a kid at a lemonade stand charges anymore.

I know we used to charge five cents.

And then we upped it as I got a little older.

It was only a

nickel.

It was only a nickel.

And two kids would man the stand and another would ride around the neighborhood just screaming from his bike.

Lemonade five cents.

Lemonade five cents.

It was an idyllic time, Parker.

That's good advertising.

It is.

Listen, none of us had degrees.

We didn't know target marketing.

We didn't know our demo.

We didn't care.

We didn't have social media.

That was social media.

riding around the neighborhood screaming was our version of social media.

All right, what else do we need to know?

Well, here's more good news, friends.

For the first time in three years, American wages are no longer outpacing inflation.

Oh, I mistook that as good news.

It's not.

Prices rose 0.6% on a monthly basis, driving the annual rate to 3.8%.

That's the highest inflation rate since May of 2023, according to the latest Consumer Price Index data that was released yesterday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Economists had expected prices to rise.

0.6% from March for the annual rate to climb to 3.7, but we went a little higher.

So prior to the late February, US-Israeli strikes on Iran.

Inflation had increased 2.4%.

It leaped higher in March, and now the energy price shock from the Iran War is further compounding long-standing affordability concerns for Americans weighed down by years of fast-rising prices.

According to an economics professor at Loyola Marama University, for consumers that means the cost of living remains uncomfortable.

For the Federal Reserve, it means rate cuts are likely to be pushed in the future.

So the post pandemic inflationary burst was the annual pace of price hikes.

That's when we hit a four decade high of 9.1 in the summer of 2022.

It drastically lifted all prices.

Now, in recent years, as inflation slowed, some Americans were able to get a leg up as their pay was rising faster than inflation.

Well, that changed last month.

As I mentioned, annual inflation adjusted average hourly wage growth went negative.

For the first time since April 2023, paychecks grew 3.6% from April of last year on average.

Prices rose 3.8%.

So you're working hard, but you cannot keep up.

You cannot do it.

Lynn, uh, we were talking about the gas prices.

Lynn remembers paying 45 cents a gallon back in her day.

And she, she had still laughing emoji.

I, it as early as, or as late as 1999 Parker, it was under a dollar.

Gas was under a dollar when we moved to California where gas is notoriously high.

I was getting gas at the gas king for 99 cents a gallon.

I don't know wasn't that long

ago.

I don't know what the lowest gas price I've ever seen is probably not below $2 Yeah,

and I don't remember like when I was a kid I didn't worry about gas prices because I wasn't driving but when I started driving it was still way under a buck You know you could fill you could fill the car for under $10 Wow,

that's

not what I did cruising around with your lady or your man or yourself if you had no friends

What else do we need to know?

There is stuff you need to know.

This is closer to home again.

Two-thirds of election clerks said they experienced problems getting mailed absentee ballots back for last month's election.

That's according to a survey of more than 900 clerks by the Wisconsin Election Commission.

Most clerk surveys said they believed ballots were received within three to five days, the standard timeframe for first-class mail.

but a substantial number of others said it took ballots seven days or more to reach the clerk's office after the voter mailed them.

A clerk in Fond du Lac County said some ballots postmarked on March 23rd or 24th didn't arrive until after Election Day on April 7th and could not be counted.

So when a local post office was questioned why, staff there said it was because of a blizzard.

Okay, well we'll see.

According to the clerk from Fond du Lac County, she said we had voters that paid additional postage to get their ballots to the municipal clerks and sadly they arrived after April 7th.

I do not want to see extended deadlines meaning mailed ballots can arrive after the election and be counted because I truly feel we will see the same issues and voters that will procrastinate.

We work so hard at the front end to get the ballots to the voter and then have them come back after election day is very frustrating.

Yes.

Now, for major elections, Postal Service Authorizes extraordinary measures such as overtime for postal workers in the November 2020 election, for example, nearly all of the ballots were set and were sent.

They were delivered to clerks within a week of voters putting them in the mail.

97.9% of them arrived within three days.

Now, the other delays

are caused in part by how the Postal Service sorts and processes mail.

Wisconsin is served by three regional processing centers.

One is in Oak Creek, which is south of Milwaukee, Green Bay, and St.

Paul, Minnesota.

So that means if you, Parker, are here in Madison, and you take your absentee ballot to the Post Office and drop it off, well, that Madison ballot goes from Madison to Milwaukee.

then comes back to Madison's clerk office.

And a ballot from a voter in La Crosse, Eau Claire and Superior, leaves the state before it returns.

That makes a zero sense.

That's what I would call silly.

That is very silly.

It's almost like Jamie's flight this week.

I'm going to have to go to Rochester to fly to Minnesota to fly back to Rochester to drive to Minnesota to then fly to Boston.

Makes no sense.

So our mail shouldn't shouldn't be the same the handling of absentee ballots has been contentious.

We talked about this the other day where Some of the 23 ballots here in Madison got to the clerk's office minutes after the eight o'clock deadline minutes That's ridiculous It is it is just it's crazy, but it's it's the way things are

I don't know.

We'll have to see what happens.

But it doesn't... If mail is going from Madison to Madison, it should just stay in Madison.

Mail doesn't want to go see Milwaukee.

Mail doesn't care.

And if you're sorting it, I would think, and again, I'm not a postal worker, I would welcome feedback from postal workers to set me straight if I'm way off the beam.

But I would think...

that if you're sorting it anyway, if you're in a city that the mail is going to, can it just pull that mail out by itself?

Why does it have to go somewhere else?

Do we have to always, because I'm guessing before the changes, if you mailed something in Madison, it didn't have to go somewhere else to get sorted.

They would just sort it right here.

But probably cutbacks and automation and trying to streamline the process made it so that we now have to do things a much more

difficult way.

So we'll keep arguing about this every election, there'll be a problem.