The general theory of economics is a simple one: some numbers you want to go up, other numbers you want to go down. A businessman like Donald Trump knows this — but unfortunately, during his second term, many of the wrong kinds of numbers have been going
up, up, up.
Case in point: a new Consumer Price Index report issued today by the Department of Labor showed that prices and inflation are up in September, and are significantly higher than they were last year. In September alone, prices rose 0.6 percent, the highest monthly increase in several months, showing that the damage caused by Trump’s economic policies is only increasing. Those prices are, overall, 3.7 percent higher than they were last year.
Even single-digit percentage changes have big impacts on Americans’ lives, especially when some of the most vital stuff we buy has been hit the hardest. Gas prices alone rose 9.1 percent in September, accounting for almost half of the overall price increase. Fuel oil, what most people use to heat their houses, also shot up 15.3 percent. That’s the biggest increase since March, shortly after the beginning of the Iran war, which is still very much unresolved.
“Oil right now is much cheaper than it was under sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump said recently. This is technically true for at least one point in time — the price of a barrel of crude briefly spiked to almost $140 in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine — but fails to note that even after that world-historic event, prices for consumers largely stabilized. Gas, for instance, leveled out around $3.20 per gallon by the end of 2022, and stayed there till Trump took office. The national average today is $4.33.
It doesn’t seem like the Trump administration has any plan to deal with this, either. “TRUST IN TRUMP,” the White House posted back in June. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end — It always does!” Since then, Trump has escalated in Iran and rambled incoherently on the stump while hosting rallies for midterms candidates. He’s asked for strike packages to hit Iran again before the election, if needed. Got a problem with that? “Trust the process,” the White House posted yesterday.
American voters aren’t this stupid, even if Trump thinks they are. With his approval rating in the dirt and even his own party turning against him, it’s clear that people recognize that Trump’s choices — namely, invading Iran and setting up ludicrous tariffs — are what created the economic situation we’re currently dealing with. And the final indignity is that wages simply aren’t catching up. The New York Times notes that hourly wages fell by 0.5 percent in August and are down 0.7 percent in the past year, putting them right around the level they were when Trump first took office. Your pay has not gone up, but the prices have.
The only financial fix to any of this is for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates again, which analysts think will be discussed at the end of October — just in time for the midterms. The idea to raise those rates is to stop people buying stuff, hopefully stopping some inflation. This doesn’t mean life gets easier, of course, it just means taking on a loan gets more expensive. The numbers we like go down, the numbers we don’t like go up. So goes the economic world in Trump’s second term, with no end to the trend in sight.
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