Doing the numbers on your grocery bill

A new kind of blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, courtesy of the U.S. From Marketplace, I'm Sabri Beneshore. The price of oil and natural gas are back up after talks between the U.S. and Iran collapsed and new threats from President Trump. He said the U.S. would blockade Iranian ports starting at 10 a.m. Eastern today and intercept any ships passing through the Strait that had paid tolls to Iran. The president had initially posted that the U.S. would be blockading the Strait of Hormuz itself, but U.S. Central Command says ships will be allowed through as long as they aren't stopping by Iran. Brent Crude is at $103 a barrel. Grocery prices in this month's Consumer Price Index are up slightly on average, about 2% compared to this time last year. But averages have a way of hiding things. You don't see the extremes. If, however, you take a look at individual food groups, that is where things get interesting and you find the bigger numbers that you have probably already noticed yourself on shelves. Fruits and vegetable prices are up 4% compared to last year. Non-alcoholic beverages are up almost 5%. And meanwhile, meat and dairy are both down. Marketplace's Cayley Wells has more on what's going on. When it comes to fruits and vegetables, the main culprits are lettuces and tomatoes. Charlotte Ambrosek teaches economics at the University of Minnesota. They had a lot of heat and a lot of rain, and not the order that they usually like to have those things in. Too much fall rain splits tomatoes. Too much winter heat makes lettuces bitter, meaning lower yields of both and higher prices. Ambrosek says as for the jump in beverage prices? It's almost entirely driven by coffee and a lot of that is tariffs. Meanwhile, meat prices have fallen for two reasons, says food economics and policy professor William Masters at Tufts University. Meat prices had been exceptionally high, primarily because of the relatively low number of livestock in the U.S. herd. Livestock farmers take a while to respond to demand because it takes a while to breed and raise a cow. Prices are falling, Masters says, because supply is starting to catch up with demand. On top of that... Prices had also been high because of the surge of demand, because of meat being this more fashionable thing now. And as that fad begins to flatten, Masters says, that also brings down the price of meat. I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace. Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there, integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time, from startups to scaleups, online, in person and on the go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. I am sure I don't need to tell you this, but we are just two days from Tax Day. And we have spent the last few months breaking down how the big tax and spending law signed last summer by President Trump has changed tax season this year. Today, we're talking about deductions for charitable giving. A report from the Indiana University-Lillie Family School of Philanthropy found that tax law changes could increase how many people are donating to nonprofits. But at the same time, reduce the overall amount of money charities get, which sounds weird. So we are asking Patrick Rooney to help us make it make sense. He's co-author of the report. Good morning. Good morning. So what are the main changes from the tax and spending law that are likely to affect charitable giving? One of the main things is the universal charitable deduction. And what it does is most people, 90%, no longer itemize on their taxes. And so they may make charitable gifts, but they can't take a deduction. And this universal charitable deduction allows people to deduct up to $1,000 for singletons and up to $2,000 for married couples. And this is a way of really democratizing small D philanthropy. And we estimate that that will have around 6 to 8 million new donors coming into the philanthropic space. So a lot more people can deduct charitable donations of up to $1,000. Where's the part where the total amount of giving comes down? Yeah. So there's a couple of factors that have negative or deleterious impacts. And one of them is that for itemizers, they can only deduct after they establish a floor of giving. So after they give 0.5% of their charitable gifts, they can only deduct the additional gifts. And we estimated that that would reduce charitable giving by $2.4 billion. And something that's even bigger is that on the high end, people who are making a half million to a million dollars or more per year and facing the 37% marginal tax bracket, there's a cap of 35% on what they can deduct on all deductions, including charitable donations. So just so I understand, the wealthiest income brackets, instead of being able to deduct 37% of their income in charitable deductions, they can deduct 35%. Are there a lot of really wealthy people that give that much of their income to charity? Well, yeah. So in that group of people who earn a million dollars or more, they account for 48% of total household giving dollar-wise. So we estimated that this tax cap would reduce household giving by $6.1 billion. So it seems like it creates an outsized effect. So also, these kind of small changes would result in a $5.7 billion drop in charitable donations, the value of them overall. How big of a deal is that? It's about 1% of total giving. And so that doesn't sound like that big of a deal. But this is something that will be an ongoing effect, not just in one year, but it'll be a permanent effect until the tax laws are changed again. Patrick Rooney is Professor Emeritus at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. In New York, I'm Subri Beneshore with the Marketplace Morning Report. From 8 p.m. American Public Media. Headlines shift overnight and then again in the afternoon and again in the evening. You see where I'm going with this. Hello, I'm David Brancaccio, special correspondent for Marketplace. We're we deliver economic news designed to keep you both sane and informed. One of my favorite ways to make sense of it all is with the Marketplace newsletter every weekday. Our team curates, must read stories from the week and delivers explainers right to your inbox. So if you want the latest from me and our team of award-winning journalists, head over to Marketplace.org slash newsletters and sign up today.