inflation remains near record highs as Joe Biden fails to change course.

Democrats try and fail to pass a while enshrining abortion until birth,

and the SEC is reportedly targeting Elon Musk.

I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

The Ben Shapiro show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

I talk about them every single show. Why haven't you gotten a VPN yet?

You're at ExpressVPN right now at ExpressVPN.com slash Ben. We'll get to all the news in just one moment first. You're paying for a lot of stuff you don't want to be paying for these days, including social initiatives from places like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. Well, why would you pay for all of their bills?

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They'll start saving money right away and stop paying for all of the dumbness that is Verizon AT&T anti-mobile. Go check them out. Again, puretalk.com, promo code Shapiro. You'll get again, the same coverage is one of the big guys because they're using the same cell phone towers. That's PureTalk.com promo code Shapiro, Pure Talk is simply smarter wireless. Well, there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that inflation, the inflation rate, the rate of increase in prices.

Slightly down last month, over the month before, the bad news is it's still unbelievably high.

According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. inflation edged down to an 8.3% annual rate in April,

but remained close to the fastest pace in four decades, as the economy continued to face upward price pressures.

The Labor Department's Consumer Price Index reading last month marked the first drop for inflation in eight months, down from an 8.5% annual rate in March.

The decline came primarily from a slight easing in April gasoline prices, which has since reached a new high. So bad news. It went down a little bit because the prices of gas went down a little bit, but that was measured a couple of weeks ago, and now the prices of gas are at nearly an all-time high. Broadly, the report offered little evidence that inflation was cooling. Prices rose for groceries as well as dining out, airline travel, and other services that consumers are turning to as they shift from spending heavily on goods from earlier in the pandemic.

Airline fares searched 18.6% in April from a month earlier. That is the fastest rise on record.

The cost of full service restaurant dining rose 0.9% from March, the biggest gain since last October.

Inflation is no longer just contained to the supply chain.

These pressures are actually becoming more broad-based, said Anita need-up Markowski, chief of financial economist at Jeffrey's LLC, referring to disruptions and goods supplies that initially drove the run-up in prices. So it ain't the supply chain. It ain't really Ukraine. It is all of the bad monetary and fiscal policy of this administration. The CPI measures what consumers pay for goods and services. The annual

rate of inflation has risen sharply since early 2021. On a monthly basis, the CPI, that's the core price

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