Supporting Texas Rice Farmers with Pam West

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Remember when it was impossible to misplace the TV remote? Because you were the TV remote? Remember when music sounded like this?

Remember when social media was truly social? Hey John, how's it going today? Well, this show is all about you. This is Fifty Plus with Doug Pike. Helpful information on your finances, good health, and what to do for fun.

Fifty Plus is sponsored by New Promise Neuropathy. Lose the pain and numbness, get your life back. newpromiseneuropathy.com. And by Honestly Texas Rice, taste the Texas difference. honestlytexasrice.com. And now Fifty Plus with Doug Pike.

Doug Pike (0:52)

All right, here we go. Welcome one and all to another edition of Fifty Plus. Thank you all for joining us of course this morning or this afternoon. I don't know how many times I do that. That's part of that guaranteed human error thing that I completely know that I'm gonna do from time to time. I hope you'll excuse me for that. In any event, cloudy outside today across the board really. Already some pretty good showers brewing up too. Might get a little ugly this afternoon and even a little heavier and a lot more widespread rain than we're seeing already. We'll just have to wait and see. But if I were a betting man, I'd bet on not running the sprinkler today if I were you. That moisture is coming inshore from the Gulf of Mexico, excuse me, the Gulf of America. It looks like it could get a little worse this afternoon. We'll just have to wait and see. There is for the first time in a week or two, an orange blob on the National Hurricane Center map, pretty much in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, leaning our way, I guess. And a 40% chance of development, but, so you can rest a little easier, first of all, it's about off the middle United States coast, East Coast, so it's not even down low where it might come sliding across here. And the other good news on that is that it's also expected to run into unfavorable conditions for development around Sunday. So who knows, it may slide past that, it might go around it.

It's a tropical weather system right now, that's all it is, so no need to move. The markets made a rebound after yesterday's little interest hike by the Fed, all green across the board, and pretty significantly so for a couple of them. Bear in mind, by the way, that rate hike, the federal, well the Fed rate hike anyway, it doesn't have, it has little or no effect, let's call it that, on car loans, mortgages, stuff like that, so no need to panic. Gold jumped over the $4,400 fence again this morning, and there are still smart people out there predicting that it might move north of $5,000 an ounce by year's end. I can't even imagine that. Back when I was a hip and cool guy and making a little coin, and felt like I had my disco shirts on and had to have a chain and a gold medallion of some sort, gold was going for about $300 an ounce. Now, it's been a hot minute since that was the case. I wasn't doing all that stuff last week, but still to jump up more than 10 times, it's actually about 150 percent or about a 15x jump. That's a lot over the relative few years that I've been on this planet.

More than most, but fewer than I want. I still want to live a lot longer, I got stuff to do. Oil down again this morning, but down to $100 a barrel. We're gonna need about a 30% drop on that price before people start breathing a little easier over gas prices. The people who are really getting hammered are the diesel drivers, the truckers, all the farm equipment that runs on diesel fuel. That is costing a fortune right now, anywhere between $6 and $7 a gallon for that stuff. I can't imagine how the long haul trucking industry is gonna get by, except for they're just gonna have to charge the people who are providing the goods they're transporting. They're just gonna have to ask more money for the trucking companies. That's how it works. This will get settled out too, and we'll get oil moving freely again through the Strait of Hormuz. But until then, it's kinda gonna be a hot mess, and there's not a lot we can do about it. What we do have to do though, is finish the job we started over there, because if we pull out of there now, or anytime soon, or just anytime before we've finished and completed our mission, watch what happens to fuel prices then. All right, so I'm gonna tee it up locally this morning. A story from the Chronicle that reveals how many free tickets politicians and government staff or appointees received to attend Texans games at county-owned NRG Stadium during the past three years. That number was 692, roughly 230 per year, to what, what, eight or nine home games plus one and done playoff runs. That's a lot of, that's a lot of tickets going out there. They go into a suite, by the way. And we have a suite, I Heart has a suite at Diken Park for the Astros. And we use that regularly to entertain people. But these are, these are a lot, in a lot of cases, county officials who have asked for and received free tickets. And I don't know whether there's anything wrong with that. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not questioning it really. But then again, you go to some of the entitlement that some of these people feel just because they have power of some sort. That reminds me of Judge Lena Hidalgo's ruffled feathers at the rodeo. You remember that? Anyway, this story is interesting, and it's got a lot of data and facts and figures and names and whatnot on who got what. If you're interested in stuff like that, go to cron.com and do a little quick search. You'll find it. Moving a little ways north now, all the way up to Arkansas, actually. Democrats Senate candidate, Hallie Schaffner, said that when it comes to farm work, she would trade five Americans for one undocumented foreign worker. Clear as a bell, she said she would trade five Americans for one migrant.