Inflation's silent killer

Since September of 2021, the Biden administration has told working families a variety of excuses for why their paychecks weren't stretching as far as they stretched when the Trump administration was in office. It's easy to explain why. During the 4 years of the Trump administration, prices rose 7.76% from start-to-finish. Something that cost $100 at the start of the Trump administration cost $107.76 at the end. That's a rather modest amount of inflation.

By comparison, something that cost $100 at the start of the Biden administration costs $121.32 today. That's s rather steep price to pay for inflation during the Biden administration. Let's fix that for accuracy. The Biden-Harris administration. After all, VP Harris cast the tie-breaking votes on the $1.9T American Rescue Plan that touched off the inflation firestorm and the tie-breaking vote on the $1.2T Inflation Reduction Act.

It's essential that we cut spending immediately and change policies to get prices dropping. It'd be a huge benefit if we started Drill, Baby, Drill immediately. That will upset the environmental activists but it'd put a huge smile on families' faces by lowering costs for gasoline, home heating costs and groceries.

Salena Zito's article adds some specificity to the people's pain:

Last year, the UAW, led by Fain, conducted a strike against the Big Three automakers. At the end of the strike, Ford and Stellantis said they had a positive outlook about their coming earnings. But for Stellantis, that has not been the case. During its 2024 first-half earnings call with CEO Carlos Tavares, the Jeep and Dodge automaker reported bleak sales, which led to the workforce downsizing to stabilize their investors.

Additionally, the Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio, has been on pause since the first week of July, with expectations that production will be back up on Monday.

If you are a member of the UAW and live paycheck to paycheck, none of this is good news — especially if you had to run up credit card debt to pay for your basic bills or bought a home or a car in the past three years with high interest rates. Odds are, there is a considerable number of people who have a five-year-old car worth half or less than what they financed it for, making them even further upside-down in their financial stability.

This is inflation's silent killer. It doesn't show up in the government statistics. It shows up in the bills and the bank statements. This news report shows that inflation affects different income groups differently:

Finally, there's this:

All the while, the public kept telling them it wasn’t good. And the debt kept rising. Now we have Harris, who started running for the presidency in July and still has not one economic policy page on her website, telling voters she will bring the economy back.

The question is: What has she been doing the past four years while the financial pressures have crushed Middle Americans? The other question is: Will anyone in my profession ask her?

The smartalecky answer to the first question is that she's been making things worse. The answer to the second question is no.