It’s a fair question, what with Bidenflation, the most damaging, but certainly not the only negative effect of Bidenomics, causing everything from food to clothing to shelter and energy to go through the roof. You want a Big Mac, fries and a drink? $16 bucks is what you’re going to have to throw down, or perhaps finance. It’s almost like there’s a direct link to raising the minimum wage to $15/hr, and up to $20/hr. in some parts of the country, and what you’re going to have to pay for food. Back in my day, before the Earth cooled, minimum wage was around $5 dollars an hour, and the same meal cost you about $5 dollars. Kind of funny how the ratio basically stays the same for those on the bottom end of the pay scale, the upper end of the income spectrum are indifferent to price changes because they have more money than God, yet it’s the middle class who do not get the same inflation adjustments to their wages and get hosed every time by the new pay/price alignment.
But this is not an economics column. Or at least it’s not a column about the price of what consumers domestically see and feel every month when they try to live within a budget that’s continuing to tighten. This is about the economics of hostage taking by terrorists. It’s getting more lucrative by the way, apparently.
In 2015, when Barack Obama and his team of Iranian appeasers were so close to a nuclear deal with the leading state sponsor of terror that they could taste it, saw fit to release a down payment, a goodwill gesture, if you will, of $400 million dollars in order to free up four Americans illegally detained by Iran. This was the famous pallets of cash payment dropped off a cargo plane sent to Tehran in the dead of night. Four hostages. $400 million. The JCPOA was “entered” into the same day. I put entered into scare quotes, because Iran cheated on the deal from the moment it was agreed to, and they never spent a day of its existence keeping up to their end of it. But $400 million for four American hostages, that’s $100 million per hostage in 2015, just 8 years ago.
For four years of the Trump administration, we as a nation went back to the long-standing principle of not paying for hostages, and yet Ambassador Robert O’Brien, both in his time as special envoy for hostage affairs and then as national security advisor, helped oversee the release of some 57 captive Americans without having to pay one penny for them. Something about credible use of force combined with threats of sanctions may have had something to do with this, but the left wants you to forget all about those years.
The U.S. jumped back into the business of incentivizing hostage taking by terrorists with the incoming Biden administration. Back in mid-September, again in concert with the promise of re-entering an even weaker version of the Iran nuclear deal, a ransom was struck between the United States and Iran, this time for five hostages. The price tag? $6 billion dollars.
White House officials will say the money transferred had nothing to do with the freeing of the hostages. But you know that to be a lie, because you’re not a moron. So that’s, checks math, $1.2 billion dollars per hostage, just 8 years after the going rate was $100 million each. That’s an 1,100% increase in ransom dollars per hostage compared to the going rate just 8 years ago. My house has just about doubled in value over the last 8 years. I’m very pleased about that. That seems pretty paltry when compared to the hostage business.
Here’s the catch with the $6 billion, which technically has now been refrozen in Qatar, which the White House said it couldn’t and wouldn’t do, until the political fallout domestically of rewarding Iran for its role in the October 7th attacks in Southern Israel by its proxy, Hamas. According to new reporting in the Jerusalem Post over the weekend by Ben Caspit, after interrogation sessions conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces of Hamas terrorists captured alive on October 7 in the middle of committing atrocities, the chosen date of October 7th was probably a fallback date set by Tehran in order to give more negotiation time with the United States to make sure the $6 billion was indeed coming. The original date Tehran and Hamas were looking at to murder Jews in Israel was back in early April and was to coincide with Passover Seder meals when Jews would be caught unaware.
The $6 billion agreement hadn’t been totally buttoned up, and money indeed being the fungible commodity the White House likes to pretend they don’t understand, Tehran wanted that commitment showing up on their accounts receivable ledger before blessing the attacks. That took another five months. When the deal was announced, and the five hostages were released, the announcement of the impending money transfer was announced. Tehran, rather than waiting for the Venmo notification to show up, greenlit the attack, and the pogrom on October 7th happened.
The entire Biden senior foreign policy apparatus immediately tried to claim the money transfer had nothing to do with it. Not even the Hamas butchers that got captured believe that.
Five days ago, CBS News reported that the U.S. government’s best guess is that somewhere between 500-600 Americans are trapped in Gaza, not allowed to leave. That means they’re hostages, even if they weren’t the couple dozen literally taken from Israel and dragged back across the border. Five or six hundred.
Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer was on Face the Nation Sunday with Margaret Brennan to give us all the good news. Negotiations with Hamas (and by extension, Iran) are ongoing.
Deputy NSA Jon Finer says negotiations with Hamas "are going on quietly behind the scenes" and they "continue to believe there is the possibility" of freeing the American citizens still being held hostage by Hamas terrorists pic.twitter.com/Jc8NZFr9tQ
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 5, 2023
So let’s give Bidenomics the benefit of the doubt here and say the price per hostage hasn’t gone up as much as CPI did last month. 600 hostages at $1.2 billion apiece is $720 billion dollars.
The House just passed a bill to give Israel $14.3 billion, and it’s considered dead on arrival in Chuck Schumer’s Democratic-controlled Senate. Even if it were to pass, Joe Biden is on record saying he would veto it unless he got $60 billion for Ukraine aid attached to it. The White House is criticizing the House GOP for playing politics with Israel by specifically playing games with Israel aid in order to get what it wants in Ukraine. Meanwhile, if past is prologue, the math here to try and get this amount of Americans released would have to be 10 times what is being fought over in foreign aid between the two parties.
Look at the payday Iran got over the last 10 years with 9 hostages. They have upwards of 60 times that. You know deep down that this administration has already agreed in principle to a price. The delay probably is in figuring out how to either hide the amount from the public or to attempt to tie it to something else policy-wise so they can meekly claim it has nothing to do with the hostages at all.
Regardless of what price is paid for these hostages, and make no mistake, this administration will pay, because they have a track record of paying for hostages, here’s the question you have to ask yourself. Where in the world is it going to be safe for Americans to travel for the foreseeable future?
