Kevin Hassett

I expect that the way to think about it is when we get the straits open, and now there is actually a lot more traffic going through the straits than there was two weeks ago.

When you get the straits open, then it's about 30%.

300 nautical miles per day for one of those big tankers.

And so the people in Pakistan and India that have refineries that are mostly shut down are going to get their oil, they'll turn the refineries up, and then refined product prices will go down globally, and then it'll spread from place to place.

But, you know, really it's like a month or two until everything gets back to the refineries.

So on balance, real incomes, real wages are going up.

Well, look, in the end, people look at their wallets and they decide how to vote.

And if they look at their wallets and look at how much money they have after, you know, the increase in prices, they're going to find that they have a lot more money.

And the one other thing I could say is that the consumer sentiment is

index that was cited is a Michigan survey that's extremely partisan.

I talked about this on TV last week, that basically when Joe Biden was there, the Democrats of the survey, they were euphoric.

Their index was way above 100% during stagflation.

Right now, it's the lowest on record, something like 30%.

And so when you say that American consumers are really down in the dumps, what it is is Democrats are in the dumps.

Republicans have actually stayed around 80% on that survey all the way through.

For manufacturing workers, for mining workers, the numbers are really astonishing.

For mining workers, their real incomes this year are up $7,000 per year.

That's a technical matter.

It's the personal income report that came out last week that said that it was slightly negative.

But personal income includes lots of things like transfers and food stamps and things that we have been reducing as part of our effort to make government leaner and meaner.