In the real world where Americans live, gas, food, and other consumer prices have risen dramatically since President Joe Biden took office.
Prices at the grocery store are out of sight. Filling the gas tank practically requires a second mortgage. And forget buying a home at today’s prices and mortgage interest rates. Apartment rents are zooming.
But in Biden World, all is well. Or so says spokesman Karine Jean-Pierre: In Biden World, gas and food prices are “down,” all thanks to Biden, of course.
No, they aren’t, and the data prove it.
What She Said
In a typical lovefest interview at hate-Trump, love-Biden MSNBC, host Willie Geist asked the Haitian lesbian immigrant to give viewers the lowdown on Biden’s doings at Camp David, where he is preparing for Thursday’s debate against GOP opponent and former President Donald Trump.
Claiming that Americans across the country feel inflation despite a “thriving” economy, Geist told Jean-Pierre that Trump will attack Biden on inflation and the high prices of consumer goods. How, he asked oh-so-nicely, will Biden handle Trump’s attack on the prices of gas and food staples?
Jean-Pierre delivered a standard defense of Bidenomics: The country was emerging from the China Virus panic in 2020, so yes, prices increased. But Biden turned the economy around.
“So, yes, eggs and milk and there were grocery things that were up. It has gone down. It has gone down since 2022,” she said:
Gas prices, because of the actions that this president took, and let’s not forget … Russia did enter Ukraine; that caused gas prices to tick up. The president took action, tapped the [Strategic Petroleum Reserve] and we saw gas prices go down. The president has met the moment with every issue we have had in front of us.
After that foray into fantasyland, Jean-Pierre turned to the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe V. Wade.
The Truth About Prices
In fact, prices are not down, as the Republican National Committee noted on X. “Grocery prices are up 20%+ since Biden took office,” it reported, and “gas is up 44%+ since Biden took office.”
Indeed, year to year, food prices increased an average of 3.9 percent in 2021 over 2020, 9.9 percent in 2022, and 5.8 percent in 2023, and have gone up 2.26 percent so far this year, the US Inflation Calculator says.
In May 2020, a gallon of gas cost an average of $1.96, unadjusted for inflation, Wallet Hub reports. In May this year, the price was $3.73. That’s a whopping 90-percent increase — and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with it. Prices had jumped from that $1.96 to $3.41 in January 2022, a month before the invasion.
Eggs during the same time rose from $1.64 per dozen to $2.69 per dozen in May this year, the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis reports, a 64-percent increase.
Of 32 grocery items, the SouthernSavers.com reports, just seven have decreased in price, and one, onions, stayed the same, from 2019 through 2024.
The prices of other items rocketed skyward anywhere from 30 to 198 percent.
Housing Out of Sight
Average home prices are out of sight as well, again, thanks to Bidenomics.
In the fourth quarter of 2020, the average price of a single-family home was $396,900, the St. Louis Fed reports. As of the first quarter of this year, that home costs $513,100. Increase: almost 30 percent.
Mortgage interest rates also boosted into the stratosphere, rising from 3.1 percent in 2020 to 6.81 percent last year, TheMortgageReports.com says. Increase: 120 percent. Today, the rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is 7.58 percent, another 11.3-percent increase.
That means the cost of a home that is about half the average, some $250,000, will hover somewhere around $1,650 a month with a $50,000 down payment. Few Americans have that kind of money in the bank. An additional 10 percent, $25,000 increases the monthly payment to about $1,817. And even supposing that latter down payment, a family in that home will spend $21,804 a year on the mortgage before they turn on a light or buy a gallon of Joe Biden’s cheaper gas. And all that depends on where one lives, given property taxes and homeowner’s insurance.
Renting is no easier, the data show. The average monthly rent was $1,096 in 2020, IPropertyManagement.com reports. Rents increased 8.67 percent in 2021, 9.07 percent in 2022, and 8.96 percent in 2023. Rent for a month last year: $1,180.
No wonder the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls on Bidenomics offers such grim news — a whopping 57 percent of those polled disapprove of his handling of the economy.
But it might just be that Jean-Pierre knows all this, which is why Biden will detour Trump away from the economy and toward abortion “rights,” or maybe the great benefit of “transgenders” in the military.
Whatever he does, Biden has no defense for the excruciating financial pain he has inflicted on Americans.
