President Donald Trump has no excuses for low inflation or affordability or anything that affects the economy. His first term record of strong growth and barely minimal inflation was so much better than Joe Biden’s to begin with. And now, because of some individual food price issues, the Democrats and the left-wing media are somehow trying to label Trump as an inflationist.
Here are just a few numbers. Mr. Trump has been in office for eight months, according to CPI reports. Food prices have increased by 2.1% year-on-year. That’s it. Now some prices are rising, such as temporarily for beef and eggs, but then they fall due to policy adjustments. And in the meantime, a number of other supermarket prices will naturally fall. It’s the nature of the indexes: if you pay more for one, you’re going to pay less for the other. When Joe Biden was president, grocery prices rose 5.4% annually. Cumulatively they rose by 23%.
As for Mr. Trump’s eight months? His cumulative grocery price increase is 1.4%. That’s why I say he has nothing to apologize for. Meanwhile, typical family wages for working people have already increased by more than 4%. That’s twice as much as grocery prices under Trump. And even significantly higher than the total inflation of 2.5% per year. So let me get this straight: Grocery prices exploded under Biden. Overall food prices have barely risen under Trump, despite some outliers such as beef and eggs.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joins ‘Sunday Morning Futures’ to discuss talks with China on rare earths, the legality of Trump’s tariffs, the affordability crisis and more.
Wages are rising faster than prices under Trump. But when groceries rose 23% under Biden, prices rose about $3,300 higher than wages. So real wages collapsed under Mr. Biden because prices were higher than wages. Now Trump has reversed this with a one-third increase in wages over prices. But it’s just the beginning. His program of tax cuts, deregulation, drill baby drill and mutual free trade is in fact already working.
Supply-side growth with lower inflation is the key to affordability and prosperity, and frankly, it’s the key to a hundred other good things.
In its first quarter, which ended in June, GDP rose 3.8% year-on-year. The Atlanta Fed now predicts that Trump’s second quarter ending in September will rise 4.1% year over year. Those are big numbers.
That’s why Democrats shut down the government for the longest time in history, because they planned to sabotage Trump’s successes. And besides, the audience didn’t like it at all. Not a little. It turns out that approval of the Republican position was more than 10 percentage points better than that of the Democratic party.
