Welcome to the Eric Erickson Show podcast, Hour 3.

Hello America. It is Eric Erickson here. The third hour of the program, the full number, 877973-745.

I need to talk to you about some business news before we get back to phone calls.

It's a free-for-all day.

You can call it about stuff that's not on my topic, but it is stuff you care about.

I do want you to know that the barrel of West Texas crude is now at $92.24.

$92.24. It's up over 4%. Brent crude is up to $97.83, almost at $100.

You should also know unemployment rate has fallen to 3.5%.

Payrolls have risen by $263,000.

The job market appears to be strong, but the problem is the labor force participation rate has continued to decline,

which means more people are actually giving up on even finding jobs and

sitting the economy out. Now, I say all that, and I need to play you some audio. This is from

Fox Business. What really gets me is this report out of the Federal Reserve. A study by three

economists at the Fed of Dallas found that

real wages have fallen from most workers over the past 12 months, and Americans had suffered

the biggest pay cut in decades because of inflation cutting into those wages.

Uh-huh. This is from CNBC. We know that marginalized communities, that black and brown

workers are the first fired, the last hired. And so when we're talking about potentially

moving the country into a recession, we are talking about the people who are hardest hit by

inflation, paying the cost of driving inflation down by losing their job.

This is economist Tyler Goodspeed on CNBC.

I think it's important to remember that real wages have been declining, and if you look at the employment

...