Tony Katz and the Morning News 1st Hr 4-30-26

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That's Jim O'Brien. Fox 59. Don't worry. He'll be back. And yes, you're not losing your mind. All new stuff. Someone's got to get out the iron. Smooth those issues right out. Tony Katz, 93 WIBC. Good morning. And you heard Ryan Hedrick discuss. Gas prices are up. I mean, we had a massive surge in the barrel price. You have things that calmed a bit. When I say calmed a bit, West Texas crude is at $106 a barrel. Brent crude is at 116. And gas prices in Indiana have moved up to $4.99 a gallon in some places. There's been a lot of talk, and you've heard the Attorney General, Tadroquita, discuss this idea of price gouging. I want it said for the record, and I would say this to the Attorney General or anybody else, price gouging is not real. You set a price. Will people pay the price? There is a caveat. If I have a bottle of water. And on a hot day, I want to charge a dollar more for that bottle. It's only a question whether or not you want to buy it. I'm not wrong for charging a dollar more because it's a hot day. Not. I have the product. I can set the price. There's no such thing as gouging in that relationship. You may not like it. But honestly, it doesn't matter whether you like it. I have the product. I want to sell for a dollar more on a hot day. anybody opposed to that would favor price fixing and price fixing cannot create the better society we've already seen this rank control doesn't create a better society setting caps on on on products doesn't create the better society all it does is create failure everywhere you go history proves it but when you deal with something that is First of all, not something that can be created just by anybody, when already has a serious amount of regulation and government interference on it. The question can be asked, does the pricing match a market? Or is the pricing taking advantage of a market? Because it isn't something that is out there for all of us to be able to engage in. There is a caveat to even my own conversation here, which has to do with whether or not we're actually believers in the marketplace or not, and whether or not we actually think there is a real marketplace for oil, not so much. $4.99 seems like a heck of a jump. But however you look at that subject, $4.99 politically is really bad for Republicans. Super, super. Super bad for Republicans. The actions that Trump has to take on the straight are now. Can we survive $4.99, $5.50 a gallon gas? Sure we can. Of course we can, but the price of everything is going to go up because of it. And there's going to be a lot less travel because of it. You don't want this. You don't want this.

for the people of Iran to get their lives on track once this is over. A lot of this is working, keeping them from being able to sell their oil, they're desperate to do so. If people want to argue that ships got through the blockade, we heard this two weeks ago and it turned out to be nonsense. Why would I believe that story now? Because some outlet posts it. What we know to be factual is that they don't have the money coming in. They've got massive inflation. The currency is down between 60 and 70%. We know that their currency is basically Y-Mar Republic time. You would need a wheelbarrow to buy a loaf of bread. It is a one-two punch, and it is having effect. But the first punch... needs to be a much bigger one. We haven't been punching over the last two weeks for this ceasefire. We're done here. Let's get back with the program. There's only one way to end these things. Doesn't make me a warmonger. It just makes me honest. We're in it. There's only one way to end these things. Now, this brings us to something more close to home, right? We talk about oil prices and gas prices close to home. There's a conversation about the farm. So there was a graphic that I came across about farmers and bankruptcy. And so yesterday I had Michael Langmeier on the show, the director of the Center for Commercial Agriculture from Purdue to discuss what it is that we're looking at because these numbers of bankruptcies. have nothing to do with the war this comes from the year before. So what's going on? It was a graphic that struck me from a source I didn't know called Hedgeye, an independent investing research and financial media company. Right. They're clear. It's non-investment advice. And me, I would never give you investment advice. Tony Katz. Tony Katz today, good to be with you. But it was a story regarding the American Farm Bureau Federation and how they reported 315 Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings in 2025. That's up from 216. So it's another 100 bankruptcies from 2024. But what was interesting is that it talked about a headline. And the headline was about fertilizer costs. Well, we're hearing about fertilizer costs right now because of the war with Iran and those costs going up. But this happened last year. What is actually going on with fertilizer? What's going on with the family or corporate farm? And should we be concerned? Michael Langamire joins me right now, the director of the Center for Commercial Agriculture at Purdue University, professor of agriculture economics at Purdue, focusing on farm financial performance, cost structures, and profitability. So you're the right guy, it turns out, sir, to speak with. So let's start with the data itself.

Is that accurate that we have an increase in bankruptcies in family farms last year due to fertilizer costs? The increase in bankruptcies is not directly related to fertilizer costs. What it is directly related to is the fact that we've had relatively low margins in crop agriculture for two years now, 24, 25, and we're heading into 26. That's another low margin year. And when you have a series of years in a row that are fairly low margins, the number of bankruptcies increases. And I want to go back to the 2014 to 2019 period to put this into context. There were six years in a row, 2014, all the way through 2019, that we had relatively low crop margins in the Corn Belt in Indiana. And in 2019, we have 599 bankruptcies. And so what we're seeing here is we're seeing that as margins continue to be tight, we're in the third year right now, the number of bankruptcies is increasing. In 2023, we had 139 bankruptcies. That went up to 216 in 2024, and now 315 and 25. If prices remain relatively low and cost relatively high this year, which is what we're expecting, we would expect a number of bankruptcies to increase again in 2026. It's not necessarily due to the fertilizer cost. The higher fertilizer cost have not helped matters. But it's due to low margins. So let's discuss a little bit, the difference between margins and markups. So everybody is following the economics. Walk me through that. The margins are calculated basically by taking your gross revenue, what revenue to get for selling your crop, government payments, any crop insurance, indemnity payments, and subtracting from that all the operating costs, including land costs, machinery costs, and labor costs. And so the margin is really a net return. This is the return we have left after we've subtracted all of our expenses. And the difference between that and the markup is you bought it for this and you sold it for that. You're marking it up X number of percent. Yeah, in agriculture, we don't really talk about markups. We talk about the difference between the crop price and the break-even price. It's a similar idea, but that's kind of the lingo that we used. And even before the Iran conflict where we pushed energy prices up and we pushed nitrogen prices up, we were looking at a very wide gap between corn price and break-even price. You're going to be hearing a lot about this in Congress, conversations about the farm bill. I think we're going to start hearing about this aggressively from the Indiana General Assembly, or we're going to need to. The full interview will be up at WIBBC.com, and of course I'll have it as part of the podcast. Just look for Tony Katz today, wherever it is you get your podcast. There's a story here that's going to affect all of us on food prices, and it's coming.

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has to be brought to justice. I hope it happens. Tony Katz 93, WIBC, good morning. So Florida has decided to redistrict. And it was crazy because while they're voting, there's this Democrat. She has a bullhorn on the floor, and she's screaming, screaming, yelling, Petulant children. Pay them no mind. Keep moving forward. Tony Katz 93 WIBC. Good morning. Guys, a pleasure. Thanks for letting me be here. They are going to create more Republican seats. They are not worried about whether or not the political left is happy. And we already know that Virginia is up against a huge problem with what they have done. because they didn't follow their own rules. It's procedural in the case of Virginia and also they asked a ballot question that no rational person could think is an acceptable ballot question. They did this to themselves because they probably could have gotten it done without this stuff. That's reality in Virginia, in Purple Virginia. And by the way. It's purple. It's blue there in Arlington, right, outside of the district. Nowhere else in the state. Almost nowhere else in the state, I should say. So Florida is going to move forward. All of this now gets viewed in the guise of or in the looking of. What took place in the decision of Louisiana v. Calais? We have been waiting for this decision, which came out yesterday, a 6-3 decision. And Elena Kagan could be as mad as she chooses. But the idea that anyone... at all could argue for a race-based district is bigotry, and that is true of Elena Kagan, as it is true of Senator Raphael Warnock, as it is true of anybody else who could possibly push for this type of madness. The Section 2 of the Voter Rights Act, Voters Rights Act, Voting Rights Act. Sorry, I should say it properly. It discusses some of these ideas about how things need to be done and handled, prepared for, and ensuring that the Constitution is followed. Well, there are also considerations of the 14th and 15th Amendment, which the Supreme Court wanted these two sides to think about before presenting their arguments for a second time. The argument that Louisiana made was in order to have fairness in districts, we must create a district that is based on race. So they created in the state of Louisiana a district that cuts through the middle of the state. It runs, I believe it's 250 miles. It looks like a ribbon of caramel inside the ice cream.

That's what it looks like. It's crazy. No rational person would think that that is a district. But they did this to say, oh, well, here's where black people live and so therefore it's a district. Like they all think alike. It's an insane thought. It is in and of itself on its face a racist concept. We create districts based on who is black and who is white. So when we go back to the Voting Rights Act in Section 2, part of its purpose was to ensure, to ensure that you didn't have an all-white district. And we would argue, well, that's bigoted. You drew a district that was all-white purposefully to say people who look like this or all this altogether. That's wrong. Equally as wrong. would be a district that is all black, yet the left does not see it that way. The left sees that is just and right, but it is not just in right. It is bigoted. And yes, Elena Kagan would be called and rightfully so a bigot for engaging in that kind of concept. This is Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia. The Supreme Court did the democracy a terrible disservice today. I think what you said earlier in your remarks is spot on. These efforts to effectively disenfranchise Black voters has always, even during the darkest days of the Jim Crow era, claimed to be race neutral. You had the 15th Amendment. By the time we got the Voting Rights Act, black people theoretically had a right to vote for 100 years when the 15th Amendment was passed, but through literacy tests, through grandfather clauses, through poll taxes. None of those things exist now, and you'd be right that all those things were terrible. But it isn't Jim Crow to say that a district based on race is wrong. It's rational. And all this Jim Grot talk, it's gross. And you can't tell me well, Tony, Raphael Warnock is black so he knows. No, he doesn't. Let me say it again. No, he doesn't. You think color of skin equals intellect just on its face? You think that someone has an intellect or knowledge of something just because they look a certain way or have a certain bloodline. Are you insane? Do you know how bigoted that is? Tony, you're not allowed to say anything because you're not black. The hell I can't say anything. Watch me work. It's gross. It's wrong. And it's Raphael Warnock, the senator from Georgia pushing for bigotry. The bigotry gets pushed in this insane headline from WRTV. Guys, I don't know what the hell you're doing over there, but stop it.

This is their headline at WR TV. Supreme Court backs GOP in Louisiana redistricting, limiting black voters influence. No, it does not, you liars and you frauds. You should be ashamed to yourself for putting that in a headline, for posting that headline. No black American has lost their voice nor their ability to vote. They have not lost their ability to speak out, and they have not lost their ability to choose for themselves the candidate they think is best. If you think we should take all black people and put them in one district and say that's your district, that is racism. That's separate but equal. You might as well believe in different water fountains. It's gross. It's obscene. I want no part of it. I want no part of those people. Disgusting, despicable nonsense people. And as you can imagine, Congressman Andre Carson is very upset with the Supreme Court. for doing the right thing. By the way, the court in the 6-3 decision, the majority decision written by Samuel Alito, did not do away with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was the hope for a lot of people. Rather, it narrowed in scope what this section actually does. It does continue to say, you cannot create districts. that are race-based that engage this bigotry. It does engage a protection. His argument was that this cannot run contrary to the Constitution. It has to work in Concord with the Constitution. I would wholeheartedly agree with this concept. The people angry about this are just angry that they're losing power for the political left and they will throw anything out there they choose. But this idea of it limits black voters, this idea that's Jim Crow, these are lies from liars and they should be called liars and I don't care what the color of their skin are. They're lying and they're wrong and they need to be told so and I ain't afraid to tell them nothing and you shouldn't be either. What is Toyota affordability? It's buying smart. Your local Toyota dealer has great deals available today on RAV-4, Grand Highlander, Camry, and Corolla, with the features and style you deserve. It means driving for less, with hybrid and plug-in hybrid options across the lineup, delivering great MPGs. And it means trading for more. Toyota is known for building long-lasting vehicles, meaning your car will hold its value for years to come. Shop Toyota.com to find out more. Toyota, let's go places.