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Joe Biden alone has already caused the price of everyday staples to soar, but there are other pressures also forcing an increased burden to fall on all Americans.
Thanks to those external pressures, this month, yet another staple food item has soared to prices that won’t come down any time soon.
Coffee is absolutely essential for millions, and many Americans claim they can’t get their day in gear if they don’t have a jolting cup of Joe, and they don’t mean Biden.
But there will soon be more financial pain going forward with your morning cup. Get ready to see your coffee prices given a jolt as supply problems, hoarding, and contract defaults are tearing through the coffee producing industry worldwide causing prices to soar. This is only adding to the skyrocketing costs of breakfast, which is at its highest point since 1979 as it is. And experts say those higher prices won’t go away any time soon, if ever.
The cost of robusta coffee beans soared more than 30 percent early in April and 50 percent now as a heat wave has settled in over Vietnam in one of the world’s top coffee growing regions, according to Bloomberg.
The price jump for robusta has also put pressure on arabica coffee, causing arabica futures to rise more than 3 percent, surpassing the $2-per pound mark for the first time since December, the outlet added.
“Weather conditions are not encouraging,” representatives of London-based importer DRWakefield said this week. “There are still concerns over a possible water shortage for irrigation, which may hurt the output of the next season.”
About 40 percent of the world’s coffee supply is made up of robusta beans whereas the arabica bean is the source of around 60 percent, according to Nespresso.
Analysts also say that some of the rise in prices of these two beans is due to buyers letting their stocks dwindle over past price hikes, but who are now panic buying for fear that crops will dry up on them.
In a more recent follow-up report, Bloomberg added that analysts and sellers are saying they have no idea if the prices will come down.
“We can’t tell when prices will peak,” said Tran Thi Lan Anh, deputy director of Vietnamese export company Vinh Hiep Co.
“We don’t have water for our farms,” said Vietnamese coffee bean farmer Nguyen The Hue. “If the drought persists, we won’t have lots of new beans to sell in the new season.”
The pressure is in full swing. Already, farmers and producers have reneged on coffee contracts as growers have been unable to fulfill contracts for upwards to 200,000 tons of beans, or about 13 percent of the expected harvest.
These failures will soon cause prices of coffee to skyrocket for consumers, Bloomberg warns.
Add this pressure to the rising prices already seen in most other food staples and it all adds up to a huge burden on Americans.
The price of eggs have been fluctuating wildly, for instance, after millions of laying hens had to be destroyed due to infections with the deadly bird flu. Millions of chickens have had to be destroyed this year thanks to the disease.
Bird flu is a growing threat to the American food supply outside of the poultry industry, too.
Farmers and ranchers are also worried because the bird flu has jumped to cattle and dairy herds, threatening dairy and meat producers.
H5N1 bird flu found at 4 more dairy farms, including 2 in Michigan, 1 in Texas and 1 in New Mexico, taking the total to 28 pic.twitter.com/SfzHQMIkYS
— BNO News (@BNOFeed) April 12, 2024
These pressures, along with the grueling effects of Bidenflation and Bidenomics, are causing Americans to put more of their income to just daily survival than they have had to for decades.
And it’s only going to get worse, especially if Biden is reelected in November.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
The post Another Grocery Staple Surging to Record High – The Days of Cheap Breakfasts Are Gone appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The leftist legislators in California have done it again, making things more difficult for the very low-income people they claimed to be helping, this time with a law that is throwing thousands of minimum wage earners out of their jobs.
As Ronald Reagan used to say, the scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” and California has once again proven that quip to be a hardbound truth.
Economics has always been a concept that liberals cannot understand. Deep-blue California’s recent passing of Assembly Bill 1228, forcing certain — but not all — fast-food restaurants to wildly raise their minimum wage by up to $4 an hour all at once, is having the unintended consequence of costing people their jobs, not enriching their lives.
As CNBC noted, the state has more than 500,000 fast-food workers, but now many of them are under threat of losing their jobs.
This month, the left coast state’s new $20-per-hour minimum wage took effect on the fast-food industry. Business owners have responded by putting in more electronic ordering devices and firing costly human employees.
The new wage hike comes on the tail of the disastrous COVID shutdowns that devastated the restaurant industry, causing profit margins to plummet. Just as restaurants in California were starting to regain their footing, the left-wing legislature weighed them down with this new wage law.
The warning by Burger King franchise owner Harsh Ghai is on target: Ghai said that the costly new wage law has forced him to put in place a plan to add electronic ordering kiosks at his 140 locations within two months, Business Insider reported.
Ghai even pointed out that prices for customers at fast-food places have gone up between eight and 10 percent in the past year, when prices usually only go up by about three percent a year. And this new wage law will make that problem worse.
“The majority of that is going to get absorbed in the inflation of our food costs,” he said of the higher costs the state is imposing on restaurants. “So we’re not even compensating for most of the labor costs that we’re going to be experiencing with this legislation.”
Ghai added that the higher prices — already in effect before the higher staffing costs began hitting business owners — are driving customers away. So, instead of raising prices further, the easiest way is to cut the number of employees.
The businessman added that he has revisited plans to roll out electronic, self-ordering kiosks over a 10-year period across his 140 locations and will now add them in a matter of months.
“[W]e are just going ahead and installing the kiosks in every single restaurant in response to the legislation to be able to balance some of these labor costs that are hitting us,” he said.
“We can’t move fast enough on this,” Ghai told Business Insider.
“We’ve done the financial analysis and it makes more sense for us to spend the capital expenditure on the technology, and obviously when you’re buying large amounts of the hardware, you obviously get it for a cheaper price as well,” he added.
“So it’s making more sense for us to just roll that across the business in its entirety,” he said.
Other restaurant chains have responded by firing hundreds of employees. A large number of pizza chains in California immediately fired their delivery drivers earlier this year after the law passed, including Pizza Hut and Southern California Pizza Co. stores in the state.
Many restaurants have even simply closed down rather than face barely scraping, by thanks to the higher costs imposed on them.
Still other restaurants are looking at plans to try locations that have no dining area and no cashiers at all. Chick-fil-A, for instance, is testing its “grab and go” locations where customers order exclusively online or via an app and pick up their order at a drive-through at a location with no cashiers and no eat-in area.
California’s left-wing legislature is causing every fast-food customer to dish out more for their food. But it is also costing tens of thousands of people their jobs. The legislature’s actions are having the exact opposite effect of what they intended.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
The post Liberal Utopia: New California Law Could Terminate Up to 500,000 Jobs appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The cost of gasoline has skyrocketed under President Joe Biden, but he has been utterly unmindful of the burden he is putting on the American people because of his concerted war against oil, a war he proudly announced he would initiate if he won the White House.
Indeed, the war on the American energy industry is just one of the many ideological promises hurting America he made during his 2020 campaign that he has kept while in office.
As Americans suffer through Bidenomics, giving us one of the worst economies in decades, the cost of everything we need for our daily lives has soared. Gasoline has been a particular burden throughout Biden’s four years and prices have skyrocketed roughly 14 percent just over the last few months, ABC News reported.
Of the last three presidents, gas has been most expensive during Biden’s term. Forbes reported that the average price per gallon during Trump’s term was $2.57 a gallon. Obama’s was $3.12 in his first term and $2.95 in his second. By comparison, Biden’s average thus far was $3.60 as of early March.
But the price per gallon for gas is just one of the many problems Joe Biden has created for Americans with his war on the U.S. oil industry.
Biden has taken at least 200 actions to restrict or otherwise harm American energy independence since taking office, according to Just the News.
The actions were detailed in a report by the Institute for Energy Research that found that Biden has made it much harder for American companies to produce oil and gas products.
“President Biden and Democrats have a plan for American energy: make it harder to produce and more expensive to purchase,” the report said. “Since Mr. Biden took office, his administration and its allies have taken over 200 actions deliberately designed to make it harder to produce energy here in America.”
The study noted three of the more far-reaching attacks Biden has conducted on the U.S. oil and gas industry.
One of the very first things he did when he took office, for instance, was to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, an action that eliminated thousands of American jobs. And he took that move even as he supported a pipeline being built in Russia.
He also declared that every acre of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would be off-limits to oil and natural gas leasing activities. This took a huge field of energy resources off the table just as prices started to soar when he took office.
The third destructive move he made early in his presidency was to revoke Trump’s executive order that decreased burdensome regulations on the American energy sector.
But these three disastrous moves were far from the only ones he implemented when he entered the White House.
He also issued a series of moratoriums on new gas and oil leases on public lands, imposed a suite of onerous new regulations on the industry, and forced companies to take him to court to honor the leases they already had. And he is also threatening to slam the gasoline industry with an additional $110 billion in taxes on oil, natural gas and coal.
All of this has sent the cost of producing domestic energy soaring.
Then there has been his draining of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve , an act that has actually put our national security at risk.
“President Biden had the chance to top up the SPR when prices were still low during the pandemic, but anti-oil-and-gas ideologues within the administration couldn’t bear to do anything that would help out producers when demand was low,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of Western Energy Alliance.
Not only that, she added, Biden then drained it “for political reasons and it’s long overdue to fill the SPR back up. Like many other politically driven decisions from this administration that distort energy markets, the government will have to spend more taxpayer money than if it had rational energy policies.”
These attacks on our energy independence make us more dependent on our enemies abroad, including Russia, Saudi Arabia and other anti-American oil-producing states. And it puts our national security at risk more than ever.
Trump had the right policy by cutting burdensome regulations, lowering taxes and inviting U.S. energy companies to explore for and drill for more oil and natural gas, thereby making us an energy-independent nation — and even a net exporter of oil — and putting us on our own two feet to ensure our national security.
Remember this when you are voting in November. A vote for Joe Biden is a vote to drive up our costs, tear down our energy industry and put us at the mercy of our enemies.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
The post Revealed: Biden Has Taken 200 Actions to Increase Gas Prices – We Highlight Top 3 appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The “sanctuary city” of Chicago has been flooded with President Joe Biden’s illegal aliens, and along with that flood has come a potentially deadly disease.
On Wednesday, Chicago health officials confirmed that tuberculosis has been discovered among the illegal border crossers being housed by the city for free in its “migrant shelters,” WFLD-TV reported.
Officials said “a small number of cases” have been found in “a few different shelters,” without specifying how many.
As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes, TB can be fatal and is spread through the air. The CDC further says that “the bacteria usually attack the lungs, but TB bacteria can attack any part of the body such as the kidney, spine, and brain.”
While there is no effective vaccine for TB, it can be treated with antibiotics. Illegals will presumably receive this treatment for free.
Dr. Aniruddha Hazra, associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, told WFLD that Chicagoans have no need to panic.
“The people who are most at risk of tuberculosis are the other migrants living in that shelter,” he said.
The city also downplayed the discovery of the disease and claimed that the infected illegals are not spreading it.
“To date, [the Chicago Department of Public Health] has not confirmed any reports of TB that resulted from exposure to new arrivals in Chicago,” officials said.
“It is important to note that an estimated 10-20% of residents of Central and South America have latent TB infection, which is asymptomatic and not transmissible to others, but does result in a positive TB test,” the department added.
“For those who do have active cases of TB disease, CDPH assigns a nurse case manager to each individual and performs a contact tracing investigation.”
Officials went on to say that up to 150 cases of TB are reported in Chicago every year.
However, Democratic Alderman Raymond Lopez blasted Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration and demanded immunization requirements for “asylum seekers.”
“Performative politics & hurt feelings kept City Hall from avoiding the obvious looming disaster,” Lopez posted on X.
“Anyone who demanded action to protect our residents was called racist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant by fringe politicians. And now here we are: measles, now tuberculosis both ‘confirmed’ in Chicago.”
I have warned Chicago for months about what was already here. Performative politics & hurt feelings kept City Hall from avoiding the obvious looming disaster. Anyone who demanded action to protect our residents was called racist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant by fringe… https://t.co/Hf2Rfh0psS pic.twitter.com/dObytxfERC
— Ald. Raymond Lopez (@RaymondALopez) April 3, 2024
As Lopez noted, the Windy City is currently seeing a huge outbreak of measles, and most of the cases have been found inside one of the migrant shelters.
While only 58 cases of measles were reported nationwide in all of 2023, Chicago has reported 56 so far this year, according to the CDPH website. They’re the first cases seen in the city since 2019.
Biden’s border crisis is inviting a public health disaster as illegal immigrants bring in a raft of diseases that were, until now, mostly under control here in the U.S.
And it’s no surprise that Chicago has been hit hard as officials draw illegals to the city with millions of dollars worth of freebies.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
The post Sanctuary City Paradise: Tuberculosis Found in Chicago ‘Migrant Shelters’ appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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