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basically everything has reopened so americans don t want to lose time again this summer and gas prices are not entering too much into the equation. americans are going to go. i think most people understand why the gas prices fluctuate from state to state, but within a city you ll see a disparity of prices. why is that? at some stations you ll see around $8 and $7 at another. there can be a lot of reasons. when it comes to high prices, sometimes i think the high prices are just for pr. some station owners have said, hey, we re in a rural area and we have a captive audience, we re going to just charge more. some say it s hard to do business. but a lot of that, too, could be the volatility in the price of fuel. yesterday the wholesale price went up another 15 cents a gallon. stations on average buy their fuel every two to four days. so that can create an incredible difference between the stations
but inflation go up, real wage growth is actually negative. biden s budget calls for 2.5 trillion in tax hikes, 36 total tax hikes to your point. 11 new taxes on energy. again, timing is everything at a time where the american family is really being hit hard and feeling the pain of rising fuel prices. i want to finish off by asking about what is going on with the u.s. housing market. seems to be what everyone is talking about. it s extremely tight. we are seeing record prices for u.s. house sales. the affordability of owning a home is going way down. the average probability of owning a home because of this environment is dropping like crazy. now you have some areas of the world that are dealing with this as well, like canada, justin trudeau has decided to ban all foreign purchases of homes in canada. do you think that would work here?
19%. what does that do to our competitiveness at a time when we are struggling to fill job positions. when you look at the cost of products we want to sell, costs of products and services, there is a cost of energy, he s driving that higher. there is a cost trying to deal with the questions of wages, he wants us to we have to have lower wages because the other things, the other costs of products, taxes, regulations, energy, and wages. those are all into every product. raising the cost of regulations, taxes, raising the cost of energy. what are we going to compete on? lower wages for the american people. it not what we want to be competing on. sandra: a time when real wage growth as larry kudlow said this week, and joining us next hour, he continues to talk about that. it s great wages are going up,
so, the key most direct way is just to slow growth down a bit so that we, you know, we don t get into a position where the economy overheats. so where unemployment is too low, wage growth is too strong and inflation develops. except that you don t think this is the time right now for the fed to act? no, i think they should. i think there s a debate about a reasonable debate about how fast they should raise rates, and you know, right now, the fed and markets seem to be signaling very aggressive rate increases, five rate increases this year, a quarter point each. that s, you know, a pretty significant increase in rates if they stick to that script, and i m just nervous that that might be overdoing it in the context of the fact that we re still in the middle of a pandemic. i mean, omicron is doing a lot of damage to the economy. job employment is probably going to decline in january. gdp growth, you mentioned that number for the fourth quarter but for the first quarter, that