Inflation may be down, but food prices are way up. Whatever ‘Bidenomics’ is, it stinks | Opinion
President Joe Biden stood at the White House recently and touted his “Bidenomics” — lower inflation and continued job growth — as a good thing. And those are good things. But to many, these indicators don’t seem to tell the whole story. In real life, things look and feel different for most Americans.
Almost 60% of Americans report living paycheck to paycheck. Just 18% were in 2019. Credit card debt is on the rise, suggesting Americans are using it to fill in gaps. More than a third of adults have more credit card debt than emergency savings. In total, Americans owe $1 trillion in credit card debt (that’s 12 zeros).
A CNBC survey found that roughly 70% of adults feel stressed about their finances, and two-thirds aren’t happy about Biden’s economic performance.
While inflation — the fluctuating prices of goods and services — has gone down overall to about 4%, the prices of some things remain high because they were particularly affected by specific circumstances. Grocery shopping and restaurant prices remain especially expensive, making some people feel like inflation never came back down. Groceries overall were up almost 6% from a year ago.
Certain food items in particular really got more expensive this year. The price of flour jumped 17.1%, bread went up 12.5% and sugar spiked to over 11%. Ice cream — my favorite during a hot Texas summer — went up 8%. Thankfully, healthier items such as poultry and fruit have hardly gone up, and seafood prices have decreased.
Biden isn’t solely responsible for this, of course. Reports suggest everything from the Avian flu (which previously affected egg prices) to the war in Ukraine, to higher costs along the supply chain contribute to that grocery bill sticker shock.
Even if there are more jobs than last year and lower inflation, wages have remained relatively stagnant, which also contributes to that pinch. It costs $121 to buy now what cost $100 in 2019.
According to financial analyst Karen Petrou, “the bottom 50 percent of American households would need to earn $5,000 more just to buy the same things it could the year before the pandemic.”
No one president is wholly responsible for the entire economy and nor could one president be entirely responsible for even his one term — the economy is not created or worsened entirely in four-year periods, or in a vacuum unto itself.
But Biden has been president for 2.5 years now, and some of this economic woe is his doing. His policies made inflation worse, including the American Rescue Plan that was just too large and excessive, giving robust benefits to folks who didn’t need it. On top of this, he seems to try to ignore what’s going poorly and take credit for improvement. Take inflation: It’s lower than it has been, even though it spiked to nearly 11% last year and still is not as low as it was before the pandemic.
I’m sure it’s tempting, when you’re president, to constantly try to put on a happy face and repeat positive campaign-style slogans about the economy. But it serves no purpose when Biden’s rosy economic outlook fails to match the one Americans are seeing and struggling to cope with.
Biden’s dishonesty serves only himself. Because of this, he continually fails to put forth any real solutions to change it. Turns out, “Bidenomics” isn’t a good thing.
