Remember yesterday when Trump’s economic adviser Kevin Hassett said that “the affordability crisis is a myth?”
Here are a couple of charts from an article in the Washington Post describing the so-called myth.
If you have a vehicle and it’s not an EV you know that high fuel prices triggered by Trump’s war with Iran are a reality. You’re paying on average $1.22 a gallon more for regular unleaded now than you were a year ago. If you drive a standard Ford F-150, it holds 23 gallons of gas, so a fill-up is $28 more today than it was last year. Also, the average price of diesel has increased by seven cents a gallon since Trump’s controversial deal with Putin to reduce the cost of diesel fuel.
The goal is to make homes more affordable. Instead, it’s gotten harder to buy a home thanks to mortgage rates at a 25-year high north of seven percent. And those mortgage rates are tied to the yield on the treasury notes we use to finance our $40,463,151,897,249 national debt, and those rates are also at highs not seen since the start of the century. We’re spending more on interest payments on our debt than on national defense or on Medicaid and SNAP combined.
Trump and his minions keep boasting about the glorious Golden Age we’re allegedly living in. It may be golden for the rich, but it’s not for the rest. For working-class Americans, wage growth is less than the rate of inflation, so you’re not getting ahead, you’re failing behind. A day’s work buys you less than it did at the start of the year.
Trump, Hassett, and the others who keep telling you to believe them and not what you can see with your own eyes aren’t stupid . . . they’re hoping that you are.