Ed Wallace of KLIF Wheels
Blames Inflation on Companies Abandoning the Lower End of Market
2023 June 24
Never take anything that radio host Ed Wallace of KLIF Wheels at face value. Even with seemingly benign anecdotes, there is always an agenda being served.
During the June 17th edition of Wheels, Ed Wallace was pontificating on how more businesses are focusing of serving the higher income brackets of society. To bolster that assertion, Wallace offers an anecdote regarding the price of the Pasta Mardi Gras dish at the chain restaurant Pappadeaux.
Apparently, Ed Wallace had the lunch special version of that dish in the pre-COVID era and was shocked at its post-COVID era full price. The full price applies when dining outside of the lunch specials’ hours of availability. In other words, it’s generally the dinner price. As per Wallace, the pre-COVID lunch price was $12.95 and the post-COVID price is currently $36.95. So, in the manner that Wallace presents, the audience is nudged towards concluding that the price had tripled.
The reality was that the dish nearly doubled in price for lunch, while increasing roughly a third for dinner. That steep rise in menu prices requires no embellishment, but Wallace can never let a useful false narrative go to waste. Instead of comparing apples to apples to best inform listeners, Wallace maximizes the price differential so as to maximize the outrage.
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Wheels with David El Attrache
and John Ingram
John Ingram Ed Wallace John Ingram Ed Wallace David El Attrache Ed Wallace John Ingram Ed Wallace Don Grantham Ed Wallace John Ingram Ed Wallace David El Attrache Ed Wallace [crosstalk] John Ingram |
The price of $36.95 is explicitly called out three times within Wallace’s anecdote. It is the central thread around which his whole narrative is woven. But if one checks the dine-in menu for the Fort Worth Pappadeaux and for all its other north Texas locations (caveat: DFW airport locations do not offer Pasta Mardi Gras), one finds that the actual dine-in price for the dinner version of Pasta Mardi Gras is $34.95. So, despite being at the crux of his thesis, Wallace fails to accurately report the current price of Pappadeaux’s Pasta Mardi Gras.
Putting aside these lesser transgressions of pricing subterfuge, the big con is how Ed Wallace blames profiteering companies for the price increases. Never once in that very long segment does Ed Wallace mention the true driver of this inflation: wealth redistribution under the guise of COVID response spending.
fiscaldata.treasury.gov
“What
is the national deficit?”
“From FY 2019 to FY 2021, federal spending increased by about 50 percent in
response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Well… UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tells us why these wealth redistribution schemes always fail.
So, ignore Wallace’s crocodile tears about the lower middle class being priced out of the little luxuries, not to mention necessities. Wallace fully supported the shutdown of businesses, the unending prolongation of unemployment benefits, and the expansion of government freebies to all comers. And now that the inflation from running the treasury’s printing press has arrived, Wallace looks to blame others for the inevitable results of the policies and party that he promotes every Saturday morning.
And with that, a classic track from The Political
Animals called “The Dish with a Rising Sum”.
For those unfamiliar the above cultural reference, it is based upon The Animals version of the
song “The
House of the Rising Sun”. The following is submitted for your approval:
