Marxist policies have the same results every time they are implemented.

U.S. retailers are now facing roughly 12% out of stock levels on food, beverages, household cleaning and personal hygiene products compared to 7-10% in regular times.

 

The problem is more acute with food products where out of stock levels are running at 15%, the Consumer Brands Association said.

 

SpartanNash, a U.S. grocery distributor, last week said it has become harder to get supplies from food manufacturers, especially processed items like cereal and soup.

 

Consumers have continued to stock up on groceries as they hunker down at home to curb the spread of the Omicron-variant. Denis said demand over the last five months has been as high or higher than it had been in March 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. Similar issues are being seen in other parts of the world.

Holy crap.

The US consumer price inflation index rose 7% over the past year, the steepest climb in prices since June 1982, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday.

It was also a faster rate of increase than November’s 6.8%, and higher than economists had predicted.

Stripping out food and energy costs, which tend to be more volatile even in non-pandemic times, inflation rose to 5.5% between December 2020 and December 2021 — the biggest annual jump since February 1991. That was a much faster pace than in November, when core inflation stood at 4.9%.

If we can’t reject her for being an avowed communist, can we disqualify her for being a petty thief?

Omarova reportedly placed the hodgepodge of stolen items, including  four pairs of shoes, two bottles of cologne and socks worth $214, into a large purse and hid them by covering the bag with other clothing items.

 

A security agent from TJ Maxx who was on-duty and saw Omarova steal told Fox News that she also paid for multiple items at the jewelry counter but ‘made no attempt to pay for the items concealed in her purse’.

 

[…]

 

According to the latest report, Omarova was arrested in Madison, Wisconsin, on a ‘retail theft’ charge.

 

The incident occurred on June 2, 1995, a Wisconsin Department of Justice criminal background check obtained by Fox shows.

 

She had a ‘deferred prosecution’ for the charge early the following year, according to the report, which also states that the charge was dropped under Wisconsin’s first offender program.

 

When asked about the newly-surfaced charge on Wednesday, the White House defended Omarova as an ’eminently qualified’ candidate and described the case as a ‘misunderstanding and confusing situation.’

 

[…]

 

Omarova’s previous statements on banking and Marxism have landed her in hot water with some of the same senators expected to grill her tomorrow.

 

She’s advocated for moving Americans’ financial accounts from private banks to the Federal Reserve and for forcing banks to lose leverage on federal subsidies by becoming ‘non-depository lenders.’

 

It would diminish the stature of the institutions she’s supposed to regulate.

 

‘By separating their lending function from their monetary function, the proposed reform will effectively “end banking,” as we know it,’ Omarova wrote in a paper updated in February of this year titled ‘The People’s Ledger.’

 

She summed it up more concisely in a 2019 documentary film titled ‘A**holes: A Theory.’ Omarova called Wall Street’s hedge fund-dominated culture a ‘quintessential a**hole industry.’

Ouch

Data from the Consumer Price Index released on Wednesday shows that, out of the more than one dozen metropolitan areas the Bureau of Labor Statistics monitored over the past year, residents in the Atlanta metro area faced the worst inflation increases, with the cost of goods costing 7.9 percent more than they were last year.

 

The sharpest increase for Atlanta-area residents came in the cost of transportation, as they paid 21 percent more for fuel and vehicles than they were a year ago, according to Bloomberg.

 

Those living in the San Francisco Bay Area, though, only saw their prices rise 3.8 percent, and in the New York metropolitan area prices only went up 4.3 percent.

 

The figures represent a change in demographics during the COVID pandemic, as people moved out of the larger liberal cities and into cities in more conservative states.

 

Cities in Arizona also saw large increases in the price of goods over the past year – at 7.1 percent – and in St. Louis, Missouri, prices of everyday goods rose 7.5 percent.

 

Each of those metropolitan areas – in more conservative states – faced worse inflation than the national average – at 6.2 percent, the highest it has been in over 30 years.

Brandon’s America is getting really expensive.

Inflation across a broad swath of products that consumers buy every day was even worse than expected in October, hitting its highest point in more than 30 years, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.

 

The consumer price index, which is a basket of products ranging from gasoline and health care to groceries and rents, rose 6.2% from a year ago. That compared to the 5.9% Dow Jones estimate.

On a monthly basis, the CPI increased 0.9% against the 0.6% estimate.

 

Stripping out volatile food and energy prices, so-called core CPI was up 0.6% against the estimate of 0.4%. Annual core inflation ran at a 6.2% pace, compared to the 4% expectation and the highest since November 1990.

 

Fuel oil prices soared 12.3% for the month, part of a 59.1% increase over the past year. Energy prices overall rose 4.8% in October and are up 30% for the 12-month period.

Bare shelves in the land of plenty? Biden’s America.

Stores across America have empty shelves thanks to a series in supply chain problems that are prolonging inflation and could stretch into the new year, with some retailers like Costco and Walmart limiting the amount of toilet paper people in fear that they may soon run out.

 

More than 60 cargo ships are waiting to dock in California, carrying hundreds of thousands of containers, and may be stuck for months in a traffic jam after arriving from China and Asia.  Millions of dollars of American goods are still sitting in warehouses in China, awaiting shipment.

 

There are similar problems with homegrown goods that can’t be transported quickly enough by truckers or on freight trains.

Once again, Democratic policies hammer the middle and working classes.

Rent data for the past two months show no sign yet of the usual seasonal dip at this time of year, following peaks early in the summer, when many lease renewals come due.

Carter’s -er- Biden’s America.

Prices for natural gas, the most common way to heat homes and a leading fuel source for generating electricity, have surged more than 180% over the past 12 months to $5.90 per million British thermal units. Natural gas hasn’t been this expensive since February 2014.

The risk is that an early winter or extremely cold fall temperatures will force households to crank up the heat. That would further shrink the nation’s below-average stockpiles of natural gas and could lift prices even higher.

Good. COVID is a virus that will be with us forevermore. It is time to treat it like we would any other malady.

In 2020, as the pandemic took hold, U.S. health insurance companies declared they would cover 100% of the costs for covid treatment, waiving co-pays and expensive deductibles for hospital stays that frequently range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 

But this year, most insurers have reinstated co-pays and deductibles for covid patients, in many cases even before vaccines became widely available. The companies imposed the costs as industry profits remained strong or grew in 2020, with insurers paying out less to cover elective procedures that hospitals suspended during the crisis.

Remember that whenever insurance covers anything 100%, all that means is that all premium payers are picking up the full bill.

There’s a lot to unpack in this editorial paragraph that pretends to be news.

Americans are going to have to live with this new pandemic normal as the stilts the government built to prop Americans up during the pandemic come down, even though Democrats are simultaneously pushing forward with longer-term agenda items that would remake the economy to better support low-income workers.