Pun Salad

One of my Facebook friends from high school reposted this:

Chipotle raised prices six times since 2021 and kept them high — even as costs have flattened.

The result?

Profits jumped 110%. It authorized $400M in stock buybacks. Its CEO was paid $22.4M in 2023...1,354 times the median Chipotle employee.

What's really driving inflation?

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) July 27, 2024

Since I want to retain her Facebook friendship, I made only a mild response.

But I couldn't help but note Robert Reich's dishonest language, seemingly outraged that Chipotle "kept [its prices] high — even as costs have flattened."

Sigh. Another way to say this: since inflation has eased, Chipotle has kept its prices in line with its costs.

I've read that the major costs incurred by restaurants are food and labor. So stories like this one (from April) were pretty easy to find: Chipotle Responds To California Wage Hike By Raising Prices.

And that hated CEO whose salary bugs Reich so much is Brian Niccol, who's also in the news: Starbucks CEO replaced by Brian Niccol, a fixer who revived Chipotle when the chain was in distress,

So now he's off to fix Starbucks. And, if he succeeds, keeping customers, employees, and investors happy, he'll be handsomely rewarded. Good for him.

(UPDATE: Actual economist Alex Tabarrok has a good article on this topic: Why Top CEOs Earn Big Paychecks, using Niccol as an example.)

We could quibble further about Reich's fantasies about the root causes of inflation. But let's leave it with Don Boudreaux's classic query, aimed at folks like Reich:

“If what you say is true, why don’t you start a company that charges more reasonable prices or offers larger portions? You’d make a fortune by attracting away from the price-gougers all the consumers who you assert are now suffering terribly. Rather than siccing the government on the alleged price-gougers, if you instead went into competition with them you’d enrich yourself and consumers! Can you explain to me why you don’t put your money where your mouth is?”

But (as I've said in the past): people like Reich have never run anything except their mouths.

Also of note:

• Is there smart demagoguery? To go along with Reich's dumb demagoguery, Kevin D. Williamson talks about Kamala Harris’ Dumb Demagoguery.

  If you think, as Kamala Harris thinks, or says she thinks—(“thinks”)—that inflation in grocery prices is the result of “price gouging,” then I don’t want to hear you ever complaining about conspiracy theories. Because that is a big, dumb conspiracy theory, the sort of thing that can be taken seriously only by asses of exceptional asininity. 

  Here’s a question: Why doesn’t a Big Mac cost $500? Why doesn’t a pack of socks at Walmart cost $500? “Well, nobody would pay that!” comes the usual answer. Au contraire mon frère! People will pay $500 for a hamburger—and some people will pay $5,000 for a hamburger. And $500 for a six-pack of socks? Pantherella does a brisk business in socks at that price point. “Oh, but those are super-high-end luxury goods!” you may retort. Of course—and in most of the world, for most of human history, paying somebody else to cook you a meal was a 1-percenter luxury good, too. But the luxury goods are interesting for the same reason the bargain-basement goods are interesting: because in a robust marketplace, you have lots of buyers and lots of sellers, and lots of products at lots of price points. So you can buy your tailored silk socks for $80 a pair or buy 300 on Amazon for 22 cents a pair. There are a lot of car buyers and car sellers in the United States, and a lot of good options at different price points.

  Probably paywalled. You should subscribe. If only to get to KDW's earnest query to the New York Times: "What does her being gay have to do with turkey hunting? If there is some special kind of lesbian turkey-hunting technique that the ladies have been keeping secret all these years, I want to know about it."

• The real trickle-down economics. The WSJ editorialists read it so you don't have to: The Democratic Party’s Project 2025. AKA their platform.

  The 92-page document is filled with political rhetoric and exaggerations that present Mr. Biden as a working-class hero and Donald Trump as a richy-rich villain. But the platform is also a peek into an economic worldview in which the government is the answer, almost no matter the question. While private businesses are always “gouging” or adding “junk fees,” or otherwise trying to rip somebody off, Washington’s wise men are capable of providing for the American people, if only they have the power to pass the laws and regulations.

  Here are only some of the promises:

  • “Health care should be a right in America, not a privilege,” the platform says. “We’ll never quit fighting to protect and expand the Affordable Care Act.”
  • “We support Medicaid expansion, encouraging states to provide health coverage to low-income Americans on the federal government’s tab.”
  • “We’ll look to expand traditional Medicare coverage to include dental, vision, and hearing services.”
  • “Democrats will provide free, universal preschool for four-year olds.”
  • They will “guarantee affordable, quality child care to millions of working families for less than $10-a-day per child.”
  • They’ll pass “America’s first, full, national paid family and medical leave program.”
  • “We’ll work to finally raise the federal minimum wage to at least $15-an-hour.”
  • “We’ll keep pushing to restore the expanded Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit.”
  • “We’ll work to pass the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, guaranteeing public sector bargaining rights.”
  • “We’ll double funding to repair and expand active transportation and public transit.”
  • “We’ll no longer permit companies to deduct the cost of paying executives more than $1 million a year.”

  And goodness knows how much any of that will cost. But never fear, all that spending will result in at least some people better off. A lot better off.

• It's a toddlin' town. Matt Welch will show you around: Democrats Unburdened by What They Have Done to Chicago. It's not a pretty picture, Emily:

  A few hours before touching down in Chicago Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris, in one of her few interactions with reporters since snatching the Democratic Party's presidential nomination from her boss, gave a meandering yet revealing answer to the simple question of how she would pay for her recently introduced economic proposals.

  "What we're doing in terms of the [first-time homebuyer] tax credits, we know that there's a great return on investment," Harris asserted in Moon Township, Pennsylvania. "When we increase home ownership in America, what that means in terms of increasing the tax base, not to mention property tax base, what that does to fund schools—again, return on investment. I think it's a mistake for any person who talks about public policy to not critically evaluate how you measure the return on investment. When you are strengthening neighborhoods, strengthening communities, and in particular the economies of those communities, and investing in a broad-based economy, everybody benefits, and it pays for itself in that way."

  Democrats begin their four-day national convention Monday in the city that perhaps best exemplifies the chasm between their party's dreamy policy rhetoric and grim real-world results. As a direct result of one-party misrule (there are zero Republicans on the 50-seat City Council), Chicago's tax base is decreasing, not increasing. The population has declined for nine consecutive years, is shrinking by an annual rate of 1 percent, and is at its lowest point in more than a century.

  He also saw a man who danced with his wife. (Reference, if you need it.)

• Amtrak delenda est (a continuing saga). The Antiplanner, Randal O'Toole, looks critically at the return on investment for a project that might have helped people escape Chicago a little quicker, but… 14 Years & $2 Billion to Increase Speeds by 5 mph.

  “A Slow Path to Higher Speeds” fills ten pages of the September issue of Trains magazine to tell why it took Illinois 14 years to speed up passenger trains on the Chicago-St. Louis route. Originally funded by the Obama administration in 2009, the project was supposed to increase top speeds from 79 to 110 miles per hour. But top speeds aren’t average speeds, which increased only 5 miles per hour from 50 to 55. The fastest train on the timetable ended up just shy of 60 mph, a 6-mph boost over the fastest train in 2009.

  When Illinois received $1.14 billion in high-speed rail funds from the Obama administration in 2009, it predicted that by 2015 it would shave an hour off of Chicago-St. Louis trip times and increase frequencies from five to eight trains per day, which in turn would stimulate a 130 percent increase in ridership. But speeds and frequencies remained unchanged through early 2023. Finally, after spending $1.95 billion, speeds increased on June 26, 2023, but average trip times declined by only about a half an hour, while the number of trains per day remained unchanged at five.

  Read on for the details on the over-promised, under-delivered project. (Where did that $2 billion trickle down to, exactly?)

  Google Maps helpfully compares various options for Chicago to St. Louis travel. They estimate a car trip will take 4 hours and 34 minutes. The fastest train: 4 hours and 36 minutes.

  Not that different! Except you have to get yourself to Union Station in Chicago, somehow. And at the other end, get where you really want to go from the St. Louis Gateway Station. (Although it looks like you could walk, if you dared, to the Enterprise Center which has hockey games and concerts.)

Recently on the movie blog:

They don't make 'em like this anymore. (Well, La La Land, which I liked a lot, but that was, sheesh, eight years ago.)

When I was in Iowa last week, my sister took me to see a small-stage production of The Music Man at the Okoboji Summer Theatre. It was a lot of fun, and I hadn't seen the movie in decades, but I remembered quite a few of my favorite bits: the mayor's daughter saying "Ye Gods!", the mayor's wife saying "Balzac"; Harold Hill's wonderful patter; and early on, the song sung by the townspeople (which turns out to have a name: "Iowa Stubborn"), with my favorite lyric:

Never fails to bring a smile to my face.

And there's something special about seeing The Music Man in Iowa, a mere 117 miles away from Mason City, Meredith Wilson's inspiration for River City. (Thank you, Google Maps.)

Anyway, that caused me to do a rare DVD checkout from the Portsmouth Public Library, so I could compare and contrast. Each had its special qualities.

The stage company did a great job, but they didn't even try to duplicate the movie's "76 Trombones" finale; that would have been daunting.