I was out doing some grocery shopping with my wife last week, enjoying the life of a retired guy, when the conversation naturally turned to how expensive everything was, primarily because everything is so expensive. Just as I was breaking into my “inflation is down, the economy is great” carefully thought-out and fully sourced speech, loaded with facts and figures, she did the same thing she always does…she led with reality, held up a gallon of orange juice, and just like that, I lost the argument.
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Her point is simple. She doesn’t buy inflation. She buys orange juice.
I get that, but I don’t know that this administration has figured it out yet. They spend hours on TV patting themselves on the back for the great job they’ve done with our economy. They hold up comparative inflation charts and talk about the “greatest economy on Earth.” And they should!
We’re jamming!
New factories, new industries, AI. Wall Street is practically delirious from endlessly climbing stock values, a beautiful thing for anyone with a dollar in a 401(k) somewhere.
Oh, but the OJ.
You see, while the administration sends out spreadsheet-wielding spokesmen to explain the economy, Americans are walking through Publix. We don’t see PowerPoint slides on the shelves. We see prices. Americans aren’t living in spreadsheets. They’re living inside their household budgets, dealing with the prices on the shelves and the receipts in their hands.
Someone needs to sit across a kitchen table from us, look us straight in the eye, and talk plainly about the prices we are paying, how we got here, and how we are going to get out. That conversation cannot be reduced to factoids, reports, and graphs. We can’t run our household checkbook the same way the Feds handle theirs. Ours must have money in the account.
Here’s a good place to start.
The was 261.582 in January 2021 and 315.605 by December 2024. In other words, the overall price level was roughly 21 percent higher than when Joe Biden took office. That’s the number POTUS and Republicans ought to be explaining, because here is the part that shouldn’t require a Ph.D. in economics.
Inflation is cumulative. Each year’s price increases build on the ones that came before.
That’s it.
Write it in big, huge, bright letters on billboards across every highway in the US!
That won’t work either, because when you get right down to the nuts and bolts of this whole thing, you will find yourself sitting at the kitchen table with a dollar in your hand, trying to figure out how to pay for $1.22’s worth of stuff with it. That’s what people mean when they say things are too expensive.
Maybe the people who measure everything in percentages need to start thinking in nickels and dimes, because nobody I KNOW looks at a higher electric bill and says, “Thank God. At least it went up more slowly this month.” We just look at it and say, “Why on earth is my electric bill still this high?”
Let me repeat this because it bears repeating: President Trump inherited a price level substantially higher than the one that existed when Joe Biden took office. That’s a stone-cold fact, not a talking point. Much as he would like to, POTUS can’t simply do his YMCA jig, wash away four years of accumulated inflation, and magically return us to 2020 prices.
It just doesn’t work that way. If the inflation rate falls to 2 percent, nobody hands you that twenty-two cents back. If that $1.22 item is subject to 2 percent inflation, it costs about $1.24. You lost another two cents. The only difference is that you lost it more slowly.
The disconnect is that two apparently contradictory things are happening simultaneously:
1. Some numbers favor the GOP. August inflation was 3.4 percent over the previous year, dining out was up 3.4 percent, and food at home was up 2.2 percent.
2. Other numbers paint a mixed picture. September payroll employment increased by just 29,000, and unemployment was 4.2 percent. Real GDP grew at a 2.2 percent annual rate in the second quarter. Personal income increased 0.2 percent in August, but real disposable income was unchanged.
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Fine. Now sit at the kitchen table across from my wife, and the rest of us while you’re at it, with groceries, insurance, housing, and electricity bills in the mailbox. Understand that gasoline prices being 27.4 percent higher than last year hurts; tell us the economy is improving, then tell us why life doesn’t necessarily feel cheaper yet.
Republicans have an economic story. They talk about growth, energy, production, investment, regulation, taxes, and government spending. But they keep telling the story in the language of economists, through people who haven’t had to think about the price of a gallon of gas for decades because it doesn’t affect their lives.
The Left owns the word “affordability” because Republicans handed it to them on gold-gilded platters. Think about how absurd that is. Republicans spend decades telling us how economies work, citing Burke, Adams, and Rothbard while lecturing everyone about personal responsibility, but when the bill hits the table, they sound like customer service representatives reading from a script.
So here we are at the kitchen table. We’ll throw down some receipts, and when we say, “This is too expensive,” I need you to look us right in the eye and say, “I know.” Then explain what it means when you say that inflation is lower, why that is important for our future, and how you understand that an explanation doesn’t help us turn $1 into $1.24 to buy the things we need.
And I am directing this to you, Mr. President. You’ve never had an issue with communicating… It’s what you do! Nobody has ever accused you of being reluctant to take credit. But Americans don’t need to listen to you talking about you. Talk less about yourself. Talk more about us.
Explain to the young couple trying to start a family why they’re unable to afford a starter home.
Tell the woman standing in the grocery aisle with the orange juice that you understand why she is still fed up even though the inflation rate is lower.
Tell the family standing at the gasoline pump that you know what 27.4 percent feels like when it comes out of their checking account.
Then tell them what you’re doing about it. Because affordability isn’t a campaign slogan for the other side to beat us over the head with.
It’s the distance between what a household earns and what it costs to live. When prices rise faster than income, that distance gets harder to cover.
Democrats do not own that issue. They never have. They own the word because, in voters’ minds, “affordability” connects directly to groceries, housing, gasoline, insurance, and electricity.
I don’t get what the Republicans are doing right now. They’ve let the Left own the ONE subject no one should ever trust them on. And that is the political absurdity I cannot get past.
The people who supposedly understand the economy keep making ordinary Americans explain it to them.
My wife doesn’t need a chart.
She has the gallon of orange juice, and she wants to know why it costs so much more than it used to.
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Maybe President Trump and the GOP should start there.
P.S. I haven’t had OJ for months, and I’ve had enough!
Image created by Luis Gonzalez, using AI.