Inflation’s fingerprints are all over the 2024 race for the White House.
Skyrocketing prices at the gas station, the supermarket and virtually everywhere else frightened Americans in the early days of President Joe Biden’s term.
Fair or not, inflation almost immediately turned voters off to Bidenomics and clouded his reelection chances.
Now, the inflation rate is nearly back to normal – miraculously, without the recession and loss of millions of jobs that many predicted. The economy’s growth rate is relatively high, and unemployment rate remains historically low.
Soft landing or not, voters remain frustrated. And who can blame them?
Life is so much more expensive than it was just a few years ago. Prices have not returned to pre-Covid levels, and they likely never will.
For far too many, the American Dream feels out of reach.
It’s not just record-high home prices, it’s the fact that mortgage rates remain high even after an aggressive rate cut from the Federal Reserve. Some lucky first-time buyers got in when prices were lower and it was dirt-cheap to borrow. Many others are on the outside looking in.
Affordability frustrations continue to haunt Vice President Kamala Harris, who has been forced to repeatedly defend the administration’s economic track record.
Harris has made tackling prices a centerpiece of her agenda. She has called for boosting the minimum wage, ramping up tax credits for parents and building more homes.
Even as Harris made her closing argument from the historically significant Ellipse with the White House in the background, she prioritized affordability.
“Now our biggest challenge is to lower costs, costs that were rising even before the pandemic and that are still too high. I get it,” Harris said in her major speech last week.
Harris also gets that the economic anxiety fueled by inflation has helped boost the popularity of her opponent, former President Donald Trump.
Trump loves to remind voters that inflation wasn’t a problem when he was in the White House.
And he’s got a point: The inflation rate never exceeded 3% under Trump – a far cry from the four-decade high of 9.1% under Biden.
Of course, Trump didn’t face the supply chain nightmare that helped cause prices to spike. And he didn’t have oil prices surge above $100 a barrel when Russia invaded Ukraine, an energy crisis that lifted gas to record-high prices.
No matter the cause, prices are clearly much higher today.
The typical US household is spending $1,120 more per month to buy the same goods and services as in January 2021 when Biden became president, according to Moody’s Analytics.