U.S. Voters See The Price Of Gas, Groceries, And Housing Rising A LOT Where They Live!

 

The charts above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between May 15th and 18th of a nationwide sample of 1,380 registered voters, with a 3.3 point margin of error.

Trump Says The Economy Is Great - These Charts Show The Truth

 

From the website of economist Paul Krugman.

Trump Says Groceries Are Cheaper And Thanksgiving Dinner Will Cost 25% Less (It's NOT True)

 Last Tuesday, the voters punished Donald Trump and his Republican friends. And the most important factor in those elections was affordability. Too many voters saw the price of nearly everything go up since Trump assumed office (even though he had promised to bring prices down). And one of the places where prices have risen the most in in grocery stores. Thanks largely to Trump's tariffs, grocery prices have risen significantly.

How did Trump react to the electoral losses due to higher prices? As usual, HE LIED! He claimed that grocery prices are way down, and as proof, he noted that the Thanksgiving dinner from Walmart is going to cost 25% less than last year.

Anyone who does any food shopping knows that Trump's fist claim is an outrageous lie. Grocery prices are NOT way down. They are not down at all. They are higher.

His second claim is true. The Thanksgiving dinner being sold by Walmart is 25% cheaper this year than last. But even that is misleading. This year's dinner is significantly different than the one Walmart offered last year. NBC News reports the difference:

Walmart made their 2025 dinner cheaper by taking out items and by substituting other items. If they had just repeated the 2024 dinner, it would not have been any cheaper - and probably would have cost more than last year. In essence, this was just another lie by Trump.

Trump is not the brightest bulb on the tree, but even he can see that the people are rebelling against his handling of the economy. He could eliminate his beloved tariffs or ask Congress to raise the minimum wage (which would put upward pressure on all wages) to actually help make life more affordable for Americans. But he won't.

He will just continue to lie about the economy and hope to fool the voters. It's not going to work this time though. The bills (groceries, rent, healthcare, electricity, etc.) that people actually have to pay are constant reminders that Trump is not fixing the economy - he's screwing it up badly.

Trump's Tariffs And Deportations Will Make Grocery Prices Go Way Up

During the campaign, Trump made three big promises to voters. He pledged to raise tariffs on imports from other countries, deport undocumented immigrants, and reduce grocery prices. 

It looks like he is going to follow through on the first two (tariffs and deportations). That means he will not be able to reduce grocery prices. On the contrary, they will go way up!

Tariffs will obviously make prices go up. While Trump claims the foreign countries will pay the tariff, that is simply not true. The importer of the goods pays the tariff - and then raises the price to the consumer on those goods to recoup the loss.

The United States imports about 40% to 60% of fruits and vegetables (and other foodstuffs like meat are imported). The price of those imports will go up by the amount of the tariff imposed. His projected tariff on Mexico is 25%, and it's expected to be the same for many other countries. That would raise the price of imports from Mexico (where we get a lot of our fruits and vegetables) by a whopping 25%!

And it won't be any better for grocery products produced in the United States. A huge portion of the workers on farms are undocumented immigrants (see the chart above) - doing hard labor jobs that Americans don't want. If they are deported, it will be very hard to replace them. Some crops will not be harvested and those that are will cost a lot more. The same is true of ranches and meatpackers.

Trump has made competing promises, which means some will not be kept. The American consumer will pay the price for it.

Americans Are Spending Less On Food

This is not really a surprise. A recent Gallup Poll shows that Americans are currently spending less money (in 2012 dollars) on feeding their families than at any time since 1944 (when Gallup first starting asking this question). The average amount of money spent to feed a family in this country is now about $151 a week, down from a previous low of $157 a week.

But don't get the idea that all, or even most, American families can afford to spend $151 on food. That figure is an average, and like average pay in this country, is skewed by richer Americans who spend a lot more on food than most other Americans (10% spend more than $300 a week on food, and 31% spend more than $200 a week for food).

A much better idea of how much Americans are spending to feed their families can be seen by considering the median figure instead of the mean average. That median figure is $125 a week -- meaning half of all Americans spend less than $125 a week for food (and half of Americans spend more). And a full 25% of American families spend less than $99 a week for food (with 8% spending less than $50 a week).

Of course, millions of Americans are having to be very careful about their spending, even for necessities like food, thanks to the recession costing millions of Americans their jobs (due to the Republican economic policies of the last 30 years). We know that half of all American families now must live on an income of less than 150% of the poverty level, and with an income that low, they have to watch every penny they spend just to try and make ends meet.

And things are not going to get better any time soon. According to figures from the Economic Policy Institute, more than one out of every four American workers now holds a low-wage job (defined as a full-time job paying at or less than the poverty level). This is expected to continue for several more years at least, with the figure predicted to be 28% in the year 2020. Too many of the few new jobs being created are low-wage jobs, and with many millions of unemployed people the employers don't feel they need to pay very much to fill their open positions.

Adding to the problem of supplying food for a family on low wages is the droughts in this country last year and this year. That is expected to bump up food prices by 3.5% this year, and possibly another 4% next year. But the Republicans say they have a solution to America's serious economic problems. They want to cut government help for hurting Americans (including food stamps and free school lunches for poor children) so they can give the rich more tax cuts. They have to be brain dead.

Inflation Makes Recession Hurt Even More

This current recession was caused by a vast and increasing gulf between the wealth and income of the richest and the rest of America, and was kicked off by the unregulated greed of Wall Street. It has resulted in the loss of many millions of jobs, due both to the economic downturn and the continuing outsourcing of American jobs.

The government has been no real help in trying to create new jobs, especially since the Republicans took over the House of Representatives. Only a minimal amount of jobs are being created (barely enough to cover the number of new people entering the workforce), and those jobs don't have the pay or benefits of the jobs lost. The Republican solution to this is to give even more money to the rich and cut programs that help the jobless, the elderly, the poor, children and other Americans.

Normally this dire situation among the bottom 80-90% of Americans would have a downward effect on inflation, since many Americans have less money to spend. But not this recession, which seems to get more brutal for most Americans every day. Thanks to a particularly harsh winter and troubles in the Middle East, inflation has returned.

According to government figures the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by 0.5% in February (which would equal a 6% annual rise). The main culprits were gas (which rose by 4.7%) and groceries (which rose by 0.6%), but other items like airline tickets and medical costs also rose. This will come as no surprise to the millions of Americans who were already having problems paying their bills.

And its going to get worse. That's because wholesale prices climbed even more than the CPI in February. Wholesale prices jumped by 1.6% (more than a full percentage point higher than consumer prices). Wholesale food prices climbed by 3.9% (the biggest jump in price since November of 1974). It's not going to take long before these costs are passed on to consumers.

The rise in inflation for last year (2010) was about 2.1% for the whole year. That hurt, but it was manageable. But it looks like the rise in inflation for 2011 will be much larger. This recession was bad enough with the economy failing to produce anywhere near the needed amount of new jobs. Rapidly rising inflation just adds to the economic pain being felt by most Americans.

I wish I could say that the government is poised to take action to help -- especially in the creation of new jobs. But that's not true. The Congress has done nothing since being sworn in to help create a single job, much less the hundreds of thousands that are needed monthly.

New jobs, and the extra spending that those new jobs will create, is the only thing that will bring this nation's economy back (or pay down the deficit, since the new jobs would create new tax income also). But Congress is not interested in creating new jobs right now, and that will undoubtably remain true for the next couple of years.

Voters need to remember this Republican intransigence when they go to the polls in November of 2012. The Democrats may be nothing to brag about, but the Republicans seem to be determined to completely destroy this economy.