The Social Security Administration (SSA) announced the largest increase to the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment in over three decades due to high inflation.
The SSA announced that supplemental income benefits, which are paid to beneficiaries in addition to their regular benefits to offset inflation and other unexpected costs, would increase by 8.7%. This would, on average, increase benefits by $140 per month for most beneficiaries, beginning in January of 2023.
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Wholesale inflation exceeded economists’ expectations year-over-year in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Producer Price Index (PPI), with core prices staying high despite efforts from the Federal Reserve to rein in inflation.
The index increased 0.4% for the month, while the Dow Jones had only estimated a 0.2% gain; prices rose 8.5% year-on-year for final demand goods and services, down from 8.7% in August but higher than expectations of an 8.4% increase, according to the BLS. Final demand prices not including food and energy, or “core” prices, rose 7.2% year-on-year in September.
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Former president Donald Trump held a Save America rally in Mesa, Arizona on Sunday afternoon to support the MAGA slate of candidates he’s endorsed in the state and to talk about the attacks he’s under. He dropped multiple hints at Mesa’s Legacy Sports Park that he may be running for president again in 2024.
Trump said, “We’ll be making a decision soon. I think everyone is going to be really happy.” He added later during the event that he got more votes in 2020 “than any sitting president in history. Now we may just have to do it again. Stay tuned.”
Read MoreMore than half of Americans saw their wages fail to keep up with inflation between the second quarters of 2021 and 2022, according to researchers from the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and Cleveland in a report published Tuesday.
On average, over the past 25 years, just 44.6% of employees saw their real wages decline over 12 months, with the second quarter 2022 rate of 53.4% being the most aggressive since 2011, the researchers reported in a Dallas Fed-published article. Of those who saw their wages decline, the median decline was 8.6%, much higher than the average median decline of 6.5% seen in the past 25 years, the typical range of which is a 5.7% to 6.8% decline.
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High grocery prices are top-of-mind for voters with a little over a month until the midterm elections, according to a new poll.
Convention of States Action, along with Trafalgar Group, released the poll, which found that 68.3% of surveyed voters say that the “increase in the price of groceries is impacting their motivation to vote in the 2022 election.”
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As inflation continues to batter consumers, the number of Americans living paycheck to paycheck climbed to 60% in August, according to a Friday report from financial services company LendingClub.
The increase, up from 57% in September 2021, was driven primarily by a greater portion of six figure earners slipping into a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle, according to the LendingClub report. While the proportion of those earning less than $50,000 and those between $50,000 and $100,000 living paycheck to paycheck stayed roughly the same, at 73.6% and 62.4% respectively, earners between $100,000 and $150,000 saw a more than 6.5% increase to 43.8% living paycheck-to-paycheck.
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Inflation rose more than expected in August, leaving Americans facing even higher prices on a range of everyday purchases, according to newly released federal inflation data.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis released the pricing data, which showed the Personal Consumption Expenditure excluding food and energy, a key marker of inflation, rose 0.6%, higher than expected by Dow Jones.
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The U.S. Department of Defense is taking new measures to help U.S. service members deal with rising costs as inflation continues to put the pressure on Americans.
Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder laid out a series of changes from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to help families deal with the recent rise in costs, particularly in food, housing and childcare.
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Financial executives across the retail industry have been forced to adjust strategies to account for customer expectations as inflation puts pressure on outlets, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
Major retailers, including Macy’s and Target, who used discounts to clear excess inventory after overestimating demand for their products following a wave of pandemic-era retail spending, are being forced to develop strategies, such as reducing the size of bundles or subtly cutting down on discounts, to entice customers while protecting profit margins, the WSJ reported. Dollar stores have gained popularity as consumers struggle with inflation and — in tandem with the more aggressive discounting campaign by retailers — customers’ heightened demand for value has left some retailers concerned that customers might start to expect discounts that damage profits.
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Inflation continues to be the top concern for American voters going into the midterm elections. But rather than advancing responsible policies that will tame inflation, the federal government continues to pursue tax and spending plans that will raise the federal deficit, undermine growth, and do nothing to lower prices.
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The Federal Reserve has raised target interest rates by 75 basis points for the third time this year following a Wednesday meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee.
The new target range for the federal funds rate is anywhere between 3% to 3.35% up from the current 2.37%, making it the most aggressive hike since the early 1980s. The Federal Reserve is expected to continue this trend into March of 2023 as an attempt to curb ongoing increases in inflation, CNBC reported.
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Following nearly 100 days of declines, gas prices rose slightly Wednesday, and are forecasted to change little in the near future.
The national average price rose by about a cent to $3.68, snapping a 98-day streak of declines since prices peaked at $5.02 in mid-June, according to data from the American Automobile Association (AAA). A slight increase was expected to occur soon after prices fell only four cents last week, the smallest decrease in months, which the AAA attributed to the impacts of “war, COVID, economic recession, and hurricane season,” in a statement Monday.
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As Ford grapples with nearly $1 billion in elevated expenses from suppliers due to inflationary pressures, those same suppliers have been unable to provide parts for nearly 45,000 trucks and SUVs, forcing them to be left unfinished in the third quarter.
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The desperate attempts by the White House, congressional Democrats, and the corporate media to refocus voter attention on abortion rather than inflation are failing. Most reputable polls show that the electorate is far more concerned about mismanagement of the economy by President Biden and his collaborators in Congress than about threats to reproductive rights posed by “MAGA Republicans.” Contrary to Democratic hopes, November won’t be about abortion vs. inflation. The midterms will be a referendum on Biden’s performance, particularly as it affects inflation.
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Newly released polling data shows that the majority of Americans report they are falling behind the cost of living.
NBC News released the poll, which found that 58% of Americans disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy.
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The majority of Americans say inflation is causing them financial hardship, according to a new poll.
While the Biden administration heralded a pause in the rise of inflation for the month of July, a new Gallup poll indicates that Americans are feeling the pain more now than at the beginning of this year.
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Consumer prices remained high in July but showed only a slight increase from June, a pause from months of surging prices.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis Friday released the Personal Consumption Expenditure Index data, a key marker of inflation closely watched by the U.S. Federal Reserve when it makes its interest rate decisions.
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My wife and I recently were out for our morning walk and she commented on how weird inflation is. Some prices are sky high, she observed, while others have barely budged.
A carton of eggs is up 33 percent over the last year, while tomatoes haven’t changed at all. Airline flights are through the roof, but the cabin we rented on our last vacation was several hundred dollars less than in previous years. Our electric bill is soaring, but her personal care products and my son’s new sneakers were about the same (or less) than what she had previously paid.
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Despite slowing inflation in July, food prices have continued to rise at historic levels, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday.
“The food index increased 10.9 percent over the last year, the largest 12-month increase since the period ending May 1979,” BLS said.
Some grocery store items have seen prices rise even faster, though.
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A new survey shows that 1 in 4 college students have to drop classes due to high tuition rates and rising inflation.
The survey of over 1,000 college students was done by Intelligent.com and showed that nearly 1 in 4 students would be forced to drop some or all of their classes if their tuition costs increased by 5%.
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Donald Trump on Saturday delivered stinging rebukes of the Biden administration at the Dallas Conservative Political Action Conference, one of a continuing series of indications that the still-popular former president has set his sights on a return to the White House for 2024.
Trump during his speech declared that the U.S. “is being destroyed more from the inside than the out,” and that the country “is on the edge of an abyss, and our movement is the only force on earth that can save it.”
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New jobs data shows that a significant number of Americans saw their income shrink last month even as prices continue to rise.
Morning Consult released new economic data showing that the number of Americans reporting lost pay or income rose from 11 to 11.7% in July.
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Anyone who has a car is breathing a sigh of relief this last week. After two years of increasing gas prices, we’ve finally had a significant fall in gas prices.
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Rising prices mean that Americans are spending more on the same goods and services, and as a result more than 60% of U.S. consumers are living paycheck-to-paycheck or dipping into savings to cover their routine costs, a recent LendingClub report found.
The number of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck was up 5.5% in June from a year prior as fully 61% of Americans now devote nearly all of their salaries to expenses with little or nothing left over at the end of the month, according to LendingClub’s report. Americans’ purchasing power has declined in recent months as inflation has outpaced wage increases, making it more difficult to afford normal budgets, the report concluded.
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The Biden administration’s oft-touted talking point that employment has boomed under the administration is misleading and instead simply a natural recovery from pandemic losses, economists told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Facing consecutive quarters of negative gross domestic product (GDP) growth, sky-high inflation and plummeting consumer sentiment, the Biden administration has routinely cited a low unemployment rate and strong on-paper jobs creation as positive results of President Joe Biden’s economic stewardship. But the notion that these figures represent booming job creation is misleading since the economy has merely rebounded by adding back jobs that were lost during the pandemic and has still yet to reach pre-pandemic levels, economists told the DCNF.
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Democrats in Congress have proposed a new spending bill that would allocate $80 billion for the sole purpose of expanding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), ostensibly to fight inflation by raising government revenues.
As reported by The Daily Caller, the bill is called the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.” The bill would see the size of the IRS increase as part of a broader effort to increase “taxpayer compliance.” Under the new bill, the IRS would spend an additional $80 billion over the course of the next 10 years, up significantly from its current budget of $13.7 billion, with a primary focus on hiring thousands of new agents, and expanding operations, facilities, and services.
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Inflation has soared in the past year, and parents are feeling the difference as they start back-to-school shopping this year.
A new Morning Consult survey found that parents expect to spend more money and are less excited about shopping for their children this year.
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The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index, continued to surge in June, according to data released Friday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).
The PCE index was up 6.8% for the year ending in June, an increase from the 6.3% that it was at in both April and May, the BEA announced. PCE is the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation because it is “just better at capturing the inflation people actually face in their lives,” and the central bank endeavors to keep it at 2%, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday.
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The U.S. Federal Reserve announced another 0.75% rate hike Wednesday in response to inflation, which has soared to its highest level in more than four decades.
The announcement comes after just last month the Federal Reserve announced a rate hike of the same size, which at the time was the largest rate increase since 1994.
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A new survey of consumers reports a lack of confidence in the economy as inflation soars.
The latest Confidence Index, a product of nonprofit research group Conference Board, indicates consumers have lost faith in the economy’s future. A new index is published monthly.
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Nearly half of small business owners are not willing to hire because of labor costs and “skyrocketing inflation,” a newly released small business report shows.
The small business network Alignable released its July Hiring report which found that “45% of small businesses (SMBs) are halting their hiring, largely because they say they can’t afford to add staff.
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Federal lobbyists have made huge profits in the second quarter of 2022, according to financial disclosures reviewed by Politico, while many Americans continue to feel the effects of inflation and the ongoing energy crisis.
Of the top twenty lobbying firms by revenue, just two saw revenue decreases when compared with the first three months of the year, Politico reported. The lobbying boom was largely attributable to reconciliation negotiations between Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, as well hotly contested deliberations on whether to dole out subsidies to domestic semiconductor companies.
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Three out of 4 middle class households report falling behind the rising cost of living as inflation continues to soar., according to a new poll.
Primerica released the report, which found that 75% of middle-income families “say their income is falling behind the cost of living,” an eight-point rise since March. The poll found only 16% of those surveyed think they will be better off financially in a year.
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Several manufacturing and business leaders are concerned about how inflationary pressures are hurting businesses through heightened input and transportation costs.
Participants at a round table event on Capitol Hill Thursday said that inflation has increased the cost of raw materials, making it harder for manufacturers to obtain what they need to do business.
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All but one public university in Virginia are taking steps to address students’ tuition burden after a call to action from the governor.
Earlier this year, Glenn Youngkin requested that the commonwealth’s public universities reverse their planned tuition increases, citing inflation.
The University of Virginia (UVA) is the only public university not to announce a plan to reverse its tuition increase. NBC29 reports that UVA students will see a 4.7% tuition and fee increase, raising rates for first-year in-state students to $14,878 and $50,348 for out-of-state students.
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Next week will mark one and a half years since Joe Biden became president on Jan. 20, 2021. On July 20, every American should look within and ask: “Am I better off than I was 18 months ago?”
To Biden’s credit, the unemployment rate has fallen from 6.4% when he took office to 3.6% in June. Today’s figure is a notch higher than the 3.5% joblessness that Americans enjoyed in February 2020, thanks to President Donald Trump’s Republican tax cuts, deregulation, energy dominance, and other pro-growth initiatives.
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Producer prices soared by 11.3% in June over a year ago as consumers continue to struggle with skyrocketing prices for just about everything.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its Producer Price Index data Thursday, which showed a 1.1% increase last month, contributing to a 11.3% increase in the past 12 months, “the largest increase since a record 11.6% jump in March 2022.”
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Consumer prices rose another 1.3% in June, contributing to a 9.1% spike over the past 12 months. It is the largest spike in 41 years.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) Wednesday, which showed June’s rise. In May, prices rose 1%.
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For many readers, the above title will conjure up memories of the 2008 housing crash caused by the proliferation of subprime mortgages and the subsequent tsunami of defaults. But a better corollary for the coming Biden bust is the Carter crash that occurred three decades earlier. During the final two years of Carter’s term, sales of existing and new homes collapsed because the Fed was forced to raise interest rates sharply to get double-digit inflation under control. This, in turn, produced double-digit mortgage rates that priced millions of potential buyers out of the market.
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More than a third of small businesses can’t pay rent, newly released data shows.
The small business network Alignable released new survey results that found that 35% of U.S. small business owners “could not pay their rent in full or on time in June.”
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After this month’s historic special election win in South Texas, Republican strategists nationwide are asking themselves: how can we replicate now-Congresswoman Mayra Flores’s success in flipping an 84% Hispanic district to the GOP? Meantime, Democrats are burying their heads in the South Texas sand as Hispanic voters flee their party.
It’s not rocket science to appeal to Hispanic voters and persuade them to vote Republican. My firm’s work with the Hispanic Republican Coalition of Pennsylvania shows how to do it.
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The vast majority of Americans are cutting back on their spending because of rising inflation, according to new survey data.
Provident Bank based in New Jersey released the report, which found that roughly 83% of those surveyed have cut back on personal spending due to inflation, with about 23% saying they have made “drastic changes” to their spending.
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67 percent of Americans disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of the U.S. economy and 71 percent disapprove of his handling of inflation as gasoline prices continue hitting records at $5 a gallon, a recent Fox News poll taken mid-June found, even as Biden recently suggested a recession is not “inevitable”.
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The U.S. Census Bureau Wednesday released advance estimates of U.S. retail sales which showed those sales fell 0.4% in May.
Motor vehicle and parts dealers took the biggest hit, with sales dropping 3.5%. Electronics and appliance stores sales decreased 1.3%. Furniture and home furniture stores, as well as health and personal care stores, also experienced a decrease in sales.
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Diesel and regular gasoline prices hit a new all-time high Tuesday as they continue their rapid climb in recent weeks.
Diesel, up to $5.78 per gallon, has hit a new record almost every day this month.
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The spread between 10-year and 2-year treasuries, a reliable indicator of incoming recessions that has predicted almost every recession in modern economic history, inverted once again overnight Monday amid financial markets turmoil with interest rates rising rapidly, the dollar strengthening and equities markets crashing.
That is almost certainly terrible news for President Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats ahead of the 2022 Congressional midterms. The White House has attempted to highlight relatively low unemployment numbers as signs of a healthy economy, with President Biden on June 3 declaring the latest jobs numbers as “good news.”
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CNBC editor Rick Santelli unloaded on the Biden administration on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Friday morning, saying anti-fossil fuel policies helped to spur inflation.
“What was the forward guidance with this administration on energy?” Santelli asked. “We know the answer. Maybe they can’t get things to happen faster, but by giving positive forward guidance, by not closing pipelines, by not talking pre-election about how much they don’t like fossil fuel, maybe things would have turned out a bit different.”
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GOP nominee in VA-08 Karina Lipsman wants to focus on public safety, the economy, education, and mental health. Lipsman is battling Representative Don Beyer (D-VA-08) in a deep-blue district, and was nominated at the end of May in a ranked-choice convention. “We live in Northern Virginia. We don’t live in,…
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A Chevron gas station in Los Angeles was spotted charging over $8.00/gal for gasoline on Tuesday, a stark reminder of just how much fuel prices have risen across the country. Customers were unsurprisingly frustrated by the price, but felt there was little they could do to avoid it.
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In what has become a seemingly every day occurrence, gas prices rose to a new record high Sunday as the national average approaches $5 a gallon.
Nine states already have surpassed the $5 threshold, and several others are just pennies away.
According to AAA, the average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline reached $4.85 Sunday, up an additional three cents from Saturday and 24 cents from last week.
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