The NY Times posted an article today titled “What Years of Inflation Have Done to American Prices.” It’s actually a useful reminder of how inflation works which, in my experience, is something that a lot of normal people don’t really understand. To be clear, I’m not talking about the kind of people who read Hot Air and dig into news stories every day. All of us are pretty weird it turns out. I’m talking about people who are responding to the “affordability” messages put out by DSA candidates.
Anyway, the article opens with this:
Life has gotten a lot more expensive over the past few years. In 2012, raw steak cost about $6 a pound on average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The price went up gradually over the next few years, hitting about $8 a pound in 2019. Then the price took off — at a rate far faster than Americans were used to in the years before the pandemic. Today, a pound of steak costs nearly $13 on average.
Why did the cost of steak nearly double? The Times doesn’t actually say. The only thing it tells us up front is that bad things happened during the pandemic. But what things?
Well, they repeatedly insist on measuring from 2019 onward, which is a bit odd because if you look at the graph they present, which includes a 2012-2019 trend line, you’ll notice that nothing really happened in 2019. The actual trend was still climbing moderately then and into 2020 as well.
The Times actually makes it a bit hard to parse by only including three dates. If you have AI fill in the rest, you can see that prices were still on that lower trend line until sometime in 2021.
We’ll come back to that in a moment. But first, here’s the main opening of the article.
When economists talk about “inflation,” they are referring to the rate at which prices go up. By that measure, inflation has improved a lot, falling to 3.4 percent in August, from a peak of 9 percent in 2022, as measured by the Consumer Price Index.
But to everyday Americans, what often matters more is the accumulation of inflation over time — how much prices have gone up over a period of years. Many Americans still remember when steak cost $8 a pound, and get sticker shock when they see the new, much higher price.
If inflation returns to normal, which economists typically define as around 2 percent a year, that sticker shock should gradually fade. Over time, consumers will learn to accept the higher prices, in the same way most people no longer expect a Coke to cost a nickel. But economic research suggests that process can take years.
Yes, that’s accurate and it’s something that doesn’t get brought up enough. Why are things so damned expensive? Because inflation peaked in June 2022 at 9.1 percent and we’re still not used to the sudden jump in prices. Inflation itself has come down a lot since then but lower inflation doesn’t lower prices. It just means they stop going up so fast.
If one were politically minded they might point out that the bad thing that happened to the economy took place during the Biden administration. There’s no doubt that part of it was caused by supply disruptions caused by the pandemic. But there’s also no doubt that some significant portion was caused by massive government overspending led by Joe Biden and Democrats. In fact, things would likely have been even worse if not for one Senator, Joe Manchin, who was hated by the Democrats for forcing them to scale back some of their spending plans.
This happened around the same time the Biden administration was telling everyone that spikes in inflation were “transitory.” Biden’s team was claiming it would just go away but that’s not what happened. Inflation was headed up and they made it worse. Yet you almost never see that reflected in any newspaper articles about inflation. In fact, Biden’s name isn’t mentioned in this article at all. But guess whose name is mentioned.
…inflation has not yet returned to normal. It got pretty close last year, falling to 2.3 percent in April 2025. But then President Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on U.S. trading partners, which pushed up the cost of many imported goods. Just as those effects were starting to fade, he went to war with Iran, leading to a jump in energy prices.
All of that is true, but it’s really not the reason people are shocked by the price of steak. Inflation was 2.6 percent last year, barely above the ideal 2 percent goal. It is higher lately because of the Iran war, but mostly the reason DSA members can harp about affordability is because of what happened in 2021 and 2022. We had a pandemic. The government response slowed the economy and simultaneously sent everyone checks. The result was the worst inflation in 40 years and we’re still feeling that now.
The NY Times has a bunch more charts for everything from alcohol to apparel. You can click on the link to see those. What they all show is that prices jumped around 2022 and then flattened out in most cases. Prices aren’t still jumping up on most things people buy but we haven’t adjusted to the spike from four years ago.
In some categories, like car repair and dining out (what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “food away from home”), prices have taken off in recent years. In others, like car insurance, prices aren’t above their longer-run trend, but only because that trend was already on such a steep upward trajectory.
Anyway, it’s interesting that while explaining all of this the New York Times mentions the war with Iran and Trump’s tariffs. Trump’s name comes up twice, but Biden and his crew are left out of it as if they had nothing to do with it even though all the charts and data point directly to 2021 and 2022 as the problem.
Inflation far outpaced wage gains, on average, during the peak period of inflation in 2021 and 2022. By mid-2023, however, inflation had begun to cool, even as wage growth remained relatively strong. By the end of 2024 or 2025, depending on exactly the measure used, workers had pretty much made up their lost ground.
I’m not even expecting the Times to come out with an article blaming Joe Biden, Democrats and overspending for everything. It would just be nice if they could acknowledge that Trump is not the only president who made choices that resulted in higher inflation. But it seems the NY Times can’t do that. So it’s no surprise to see comments like this one attached to this article.
This is all on the Republicans. They actually don’t care about their constituents and yet they keep voting for them. While tariffs have increased the price of everything, the Iran assault has increased the price of oil further increasing the cost of everything.
Sorry, no, that’s incorrect. Unfortunately, no one reading that article will know any better when they finish it.
