Trump Is Either Delusional Or Lying About Grocery Prices (Or Both)

 

From msn.com.

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.

Inflation Rises To 3.8% (And Is Likely To Continue Rising)

 

Public Believes Prices Will Continue To Rise For The Next Year

This chart reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between May 1st and 4th of a nationwide sample of 1,573 adults (including 1,409 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.4 points for adults and 3.3 points for registered voters.

 

It's Not Just The Insurers - Hospital Costs Are Rising Too Fast

The following is from an article by Assistant Professor Zack Cooper (Yale School of Public Health) in The New York Times: 

There is boiling rage at health insurers among the public — for instance, over the fact that premiums for a family health plan can exceed $27,000 a year, even as patients routinely get their care denied. Such is the rage that when an insurance executive was murdered in 2024, one poll found that 41 percent of American voters under 30 perversely thought the killing was acceptable.

Republicans and Democrats have been eager to haul insurance executives to hearings and grill them. President Trump tried to justify removing subsidies for Americans to buy health insurance — a policy that will lead to 4 million people losing coverage and thousands of deaths — by arguing it would mean less money going to insurers.

Responding to the wrongdoing of insurers is imperative, but it won’t do much to address the unsustainable cost of health care. We are directing our anger at the part of the system that is most visible and frustrating (insurers’ restrictions on care) while ignoring the part of the health system that is most responsible for high costs and economic pain: hospital prices. At a time when two-thirds of the public are worried about the price of health care — a greater share than are worried about affording groceries, gas or housing — we need to have an honest conversation about what is driving high premiums and how to lower them.

Americans receive a similar amount of care as people in other countries, but we pay much higher prices for the care we receive. Take hip replacements. Hospitals in the United States earn $29,000on average for a replacement covered by private insurance and $16,000 for one covered by Medicare. In Germany, the public system of nonprofit insurers, which covers 90 percent of the population, pays hospitals $9,400.

Hospital prices are the leading driver of the 320 percent increase in insurance premiums that Americans have experienced over the past 25 years. Since 2000, prices at hospitals have grown faster than prices in virtually any other sector of the economy. They have grown three times as fast as inflation and twice as fast as prescription drugs and doctor visits.

The reason hospital prices are so high: hospitals’ accumulation of market power, which brings them more bargaining heft when they negotiate prices with insurers. Since 2000, there have been more than 1,300 hospital mergers among the nation’s approximately 5,000 hospitals. When hospitals that were once competitors merge, prices go up, often by double-digit percentages, with no measurable improvement in patient outcomes. Even though we rely on competition to determine hospital prices, 21 percent of hospitals are effectively monopolies — they have no competitor within a 30-minute drive — and an additional 24 percent face only one competitor. . . .

Politicians from both parties have called for reining in insurance denials. They’re right to. Such denials, and the bureaucratic processes that accompany them, are stressful for patients, and, in the worst cases, lead to patients missing out on lifesaving care. Likewise, research shows the high out-of-pocket costs included in many insurance plans can drive up death rates. We need to lower out-of-pocket costs and make insurance less bureaucratic. However, unless we pair such reforms with a focus on addressing hospitals’ rising prices, rolling back insurer restrictions on care risks driving growth in health spending that, in turn, will slow economic growth and drive job losses among low-wage workers.

If hospital prices are such a key driver of rising costs, why aren’t elected officials doing more about them? Partly the answer is politics. Hospitals are the largest or second-largest employer in many counties in America, and a formidable lobbying force — spending more than $100 million annually in Washington, often more than health insurers spend, to protect their interests. Politicians who represent places with dominant hospital systems are not eager to pick a fight with these institutions. Moreover, when an insurer denies your claim, you know it immediately. When a hospital merges and its prices go up, the harms — slower overall economic growth and job losses outside the hospital sector — are real but diffuse.

Another reason so little has been done about hospital prices is the chronic underfunding of the Federal Trade Commission. Each year, there are approximately 20 potentially harmful hospital mergers, but the cost of pushing back on all of them would potentially exceed the agency’s entire budget for antitrust enforcement across all sectors of the economy.

Addressing this issue would require regulating the prices for at least some hospitals. Economists generally prefer to rely on competition to determine what companies get paid. But in hospital markets that are effective monopolies, regulation isn’t a departure from sound economics — it’s the only tool left. Congress should cap the prices monopoly hospitals can negotiate with private insurers, using Medicare rates or prices in other competitive markets as benchmarks.

Perhaps more than anything else, what makes hospital prices so hard to confront is that the relationship we have with our health care providers is very different from the transactional relationship we have with our insurers.

The physician and scholar Jay Katz spent his career writing abouthow vulnerability, fear and gratitude make it difficult to hold doctors and hospitals to the kind of scrutiny that we apply to other powerful institutions. We lean on hospitals when our children are born, when our parents get sick and when we approach life’s end. That kind of reliance requires trust.

Republicans Would Rather Lie Than Solve The Affordability Problem

The following is part of an article by Paul Krugman (Nobel Prize-winning economist): 

Republicans have an affordability problem. During the 2024 campaign Donald Trump promised to reduce prices beginning on “Day One,” and promised specifically that he would cut energy prices in half. He has instead presided over rising inflation — the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure is running almost a percentage point higher than it was when he took office — and his Iran debacle has caused a spike in gasoline and diesel prices:

A normal political party would respond to this problem by trying to solve it. OK, some blame-shifting — attributing rising prices to forces beyond the president’s control or insisting that current problems were caused by the previous administration’s policies — would also be par for the course.

But MAGA is trying to deal with its affordability crisis simply by denying reality. Over the past few days multiple prominent Republicans have gone on TV to insist that gas prices are falling. On Thursday Sen. Tim Scott said that “gas prices continue to come down,” while House Majority Leader Steve Scalise declared that gas is much cheaper than it was “two years ago,” when, he claimed, it was $6 a gallon. The average price then was actually $3.66.

And Pete Hegseth, the Defense secretary, told Congress that gas prices in California were $8 a gallon on the eve of the Iran war; the average was actually $4.64.

What’s striking about these efforts to create an alternate reality isn’t merely the fact that politicians are lying. It’s the fact that they’re lying about a subject in which the truth is more or less literally in everyone’s face every day. Lies about, say, immigrant crime are difficult for ordinary Americans to check. But gas prices are displayed on giant signs all around America — and drivers face a reality check on fuel costs every time they fill their tanks.

Why, then, do Republicans believe that these lies will work for them politically?

The answer, of course, is that they’re aimed at an audience of one. Voters know that gas prices are way up and that inflation is elevated, but Donald Trump, swaddled in his Mar-a-Lago bubble, doesn’t. Trump says that we have no inflation. He recently insisted that inflation was 5 percent at the end of Biden’s term and took credit for falling inflation before he took office. So Republicans determined to say whatever he wants to hear — which means everyone still in the party — feel obliged to praise his inflation record, the facts be damned.

And for those worried that this kind of behavior, where keeping the Leader happy is far more important than respecting the truth, will lead to policy mistakes, I have three words for you: Strait of Hormuz.

It Could Take Months For Prices To Go Down After The Strait Opens - Here's Why

Donald Trump has given Americans the impression that once the Strait of Hormuz is opened the price of oil (and gasoline) will quickly return to pre-war prices. That is simply not true. Here, from CNN, is the truth:

Assuming the strait has truly reopened, a logistical nightmare is about to unfold.

Step one: Clearing the strait’s bottlenecks. That’s going to take a long time, since tankers move about as fast as you can ride a bicycle.

First, the 128 or so tankers stuck in the strait need to clear out, carrying around 160 million barrels of oil with them, according to Capital Economics. That will make way for empty tankers to enter the strait, load up and head back out.

A return to full tanker transit capacity could take up to three months, according to Victoria Grabenwöger, senior oil analyst at Kpler.

Step two: Drawing down stockpiles. Empty ships will first draw oil from the warehouses that have been filled up – because producers had nowhere else to put it.

The good news: Refiners were pragmatic about their storage and never fully filled their stockpiles. That should reduce some of the time it would otherwise take to reboot pumps. But fuller-than-typical inventories will nevertheless delay getting oil production back up to full capacity.

Step three: Restarting production. Middle Eastern oil wells were largely shut off during the war. Turning on production isn’t like flipping a switch. It’s a complex engineering challenge that involves serious physics and labor over up to several weeks.

Production will need to be restarted – slowly – to ensure reservoirs of crude don’t collapse, requiring re-drilling and substantial repairs. Water and gas injected into wells need to be rebalanced, which is a tricky business.

Because wells in the region are large and close to one another, restarting production will require significant coordination across companies and countries to ensure injected water and gas pressure remain consistent across multiple wells.

Step four: Making repairs. A number of refiners, natural gas producers and some oil producers were damaged during the war. Some repairs to the damaged critical infrastructure could take years to complete, oil companies said.

There’s a lot of oil go get back online: 12 million barrels per day of crude output and 3 million barrels of refined petroleum products have been shut across the Middle East – mostly in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, according to Kpler. That’s no easy feat.

All of that assumes the war is over and there are no further disruptions in the strait. And we all know what happens when you assume….

Voters Are Very Angry About Prices And Inflation

 

The charts above are from the Change Research Poll -- done between April 3rd and 7th of a nationwide sample of 2,702 registered voters, with a 2.0 point margin of error.

Public Is Concerned That's Trump's War With Iran Will Raise Prices

 The chart above reflects the results of the YouGov Poll -- done on March 20th of a nationwide sample of 3,709 adults.

Trump's Job Approval Is Bad - His Approval On Prices/Inflation Is Worse

 

From G. Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers.

Public Doesn't Believe Trump - Know Prices Are Higher This Year

The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between November 28th and December 1st of a nationwide sample of 1,628 adults (including 1,456 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.2 points for adults and 3.1 points for registered voters. 

Did Trump Just Admit He Was WRONG About Tariffs?

During the campaign, Donald Trump promised voters that he would reduce prices. He hasn't done that. In fact, he has been the biggest reason that prices continue to go up. 

He loves tariffs. He had a dream that he could impose tariffs on nearly every country in the world (which he did), and use the income from those tariffs to lower taxes for himself and his rich buddies (which he also did).

He was warned by economists that those tariffs are a tax that would be paid by American businesses and consumers. But he denied that - continuously claiming that the tariffs would be paid by foreign countries.

The economists were right and Trump was wrong. Businesses tried to eat the cost of the tariffs for a while, but finally had to raise prices on the goods they imported. Now inflation is at 3% and rising. And Americans are seeing prices rise on nearly everything they need.

It has gotten so bad that many people are finding it hard to afford to live in the United States. And in the last election a couple of weeks ago, they vented their anger at Trump and the Republicans by giving Democrats huge victories in state and local races across the country.

Trump tried to deny his responsibility for too many Americans having trouble affording life in America, but his GOP cohorts (afraid the affordability issue would devastate them in 2026) begged him to do something about it.

Just a couple of days ago, Trump reduced the tariffs on items that can't be grown in the United States (like coffee and bananas). In doing so, he has admitted that his tariffs are at least part of the problem of rising prices.

It is not enough. While prices may be mitigated on a few grocery items, it is doubtful that it will affect overall grocery prices very much (especially since his deportation of agricultural workers is also adding to inflation). And groceries were just part of the problem. Prices are rising on electricity, rent, autos, electronics, health insurance (thanks to his ending of ACA subsidies), and many other things. 

The affordability issue is not going away. His regressive tariff taxes on Americans continue to drive up prices. And wages are not rising enough to cover the inflation. The poor, the working class, and the middle class need some help. 

Unfortunately, Trump and the congressional GOP don't care about anyone but the rich and corporations. They are not going to lower prices or raise wages. 

Lowering the price of coffee and bananas is not enough. Much more needs to be done - and that means the affordability issue will be the primary driver in next year's election. It will likely cost the GOP control of Congress and make Trump a true lame duck.

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 Continues To Lose Ground On The Economy And Prices

 

The charts above reflect the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between October 17th and 20th of a nationwide sample of 1,621 adults (including 1,448 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.4 points for adults and 3 points for registered voters. 

Voters In Battleground Districts Are Unhappy With Tariffs And Rising Costs

 

The charts above are from the Navigator Poll -- done between September 18th and 21st of 1,500 voters in 61 battleground congressional districts. The margin of error is 2.5 points.

Energy, Healthcare, And Grocery Prices Are Rising Sharply

 

Most People Expect Prices To Increase Over The Next 12 Months

The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between September 5th and 8th of a nationwide sample of 1,644 adults (including 1,487 registered voters). The Margin of error is 3.4 point for adults and 3.1 points for registered voters.

 

The Public Is Worried About Rising Costs (Especially Food, Housing, And Healthcare)

 The chart above is from the AP / NORC Poll -- done between July 10th and 14th of a nationwide sample of 1,427 adults, with a 3.6 point margin of error.

Public Wants Stores To List The Cost Of Tariffs On Prices

The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between May 2nd and 5th of a nationwide sample of 1,850 adults (including 1,693 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.4 points for adults and 3.2 points for registered voters.

And they know the tariffs will raise prices!

The Economy, Prices, And Tariffs Are Dragging Trump's Numbers Down

 

These charts are from the CBS News / YouGov Poll -- done between April 8th and 11th of a nationwide sample of 2,410 adults, with a 2.4 point margin of error.