The goods and services American workers could afford with $100 in 2020 now cost $119.27, a recent Bloomberg report found.
The increased prices will likely impact the 2024 election results since they come after President Joe Biden implemented his economic policy of so-called “Bidenomics.”
Over half of voters in key swing states said grocery prices are the top way inflation has impacted their budget, according to a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult survey.
Bloomberg reported the goods and services price increases:
- Ground beef costs $5.23 on average, up from $3.89 in January 2020.
- Coffee is up some $2 a pound. Fruits and vegetables are about 14 percent higher.
- Electric bills spiked 25 percent since January 2020.
- Natural gas is up 29 percent since January 2020.
- Car insurance is up 33 percent since 2020.
- Hotel prices are up 15 percent since 2020.
- Grocery and electricity prices are both up 25 percent since January 2020.
- Used car prices have climbed 35 percent since 2020.
- Auto insurance is up 33 percent, and rents are up roughly 20 percent since 2020.
Inflation fell from the four-decade highs hit in 2022, but prices are still rising much faster than the Federal Reserve’s two percent target. The Fed estimates inflation will not fall back down to normal levels until 2025.
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Biden recently blamed — without evidence — inflation on “price gouging” by businesses. In a speech on Monday, Biden also confused the decline in the rate of inflation, which means the pace of price increases has slowed with prices actually declining to their pre-Biden administration levels, a prospect economists say is extremely unlikely.
“The reality is setting in for consumers that prices rarely go down, especially not in the aggregate. And so really the best they can hope for is prices leveling off and — at the very least — growing at a slower rate,” Wells Fargo & Co. Senior Economist Sarah House told Bloomberg. “Hopefully they level off and give a chance for incomes to continue to grow.”
“It’s a huge slap in the face and I’m surprised that some people are saying inflation’s coming down,” Ryan Essenburg, who lives in California’s Bay Area, told the outlet. “It’s hard. You go get your bill and it’s like, ‘What’s happening here?’”
Follow Wendell Husebø on “X” @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.