In this week’s show, Prof. Wolff presents updates on US’s groceries inflation; US teacher crisis; capitalists profiting from guns and protection from guns, UN report on global suffering from Ukraine war’s and sanctions regimes’ costs to world’s people in terms of fuel, food, and interest rate inflations; and median New York City rent of $4,000/month make city housing increasingly unaffordable to most New Yorkers. In the second half of the show, Wolff is joined by Katie Halper: podcaster, writer, and filmmaker who talks about political decline in the US.
Transcript has been edited for clarity
Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. I’m your host Richard Wolff. Today I’ll be discussing more fallout from guns, the global impact of the war in the Ukraine, rental, inflation, and more. Then in the second half, I’ll be talking with podcaster and journalist Katie Halper.
I want to begin with an inflation number that says most important things. First, this is a number I’m about to give you that measures the increase in prices of meals taken at home. In other words, what has happened to the prices of those things we typically buy in the supermarket and take home to eat or in the department store and so forth. But mostly this number measures eating supermarket food at home. Prices rose over the last year 12%. Keep that number in mind. To eat at home is 12% more expensive than a year ago but the measurements the government and others are taking for how much more American families are paying and spending on groceries and food to eat at home
— source democracyatwork.info | Richard Wolff | Jun 27, 2022