Regardless of what you read or hear in the news, the reason food prices are so high today is not hard to understand. It is also a perfect example of the news media and the Democrats complicating and twisting an issue to fit their narrative rather than report the bare truth.
The historical record of the consumer price index (CPI) tells the whole story. Here is the definition of the CPI from Bureau of Labor Statistics: … a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods and services. One of those “market baskets” of consumer goods the CPI measures is household food.
During the last part of the Obama Administration and for the entirety of Trump’s first term (2015 – 2020), the CPI was stable, with relatively low increases year-over-year. Prices were increasing, but at a very slow rate (about 2% per year). Because median household incomes increased by an average of 2.9% per year during that same period, the net effect for most people was that the cost of living stayed about the same.
This balance persisted through to March of 2021, shortly after Trump left office and Biden became President. After that, consumer prices for most things went up, with food prices leading the way among the major categories measured in the CPI. This caused the CPI to sharply rise, and consequently the inflation rate1 to dramatically increase.
The steep rise in the CPI food category continued through the rest of 2021 and into 2022, peaking in June of 2022. While the rate of increase did begin to fall in July of 2022, it remained significantly elevated through mid-2024.
Here is an example with real numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics of how the average price of a food item was affected. Assuming we start with something that costs $10 at the beginning of 2020, here is how the cost of that item increased:
End of 2020 – $10.37
End of 2021 – $11.14
End of 2022 – $12.40
End of 2023 – $12.72
End of 2024 – $13.04
That is over a 30% increase in just 5 years. The popular theory among Democrats and the liberal media is that it was the COVID pandemic, not any of the policies of the Biden Administration, that was the cause of the sharp increase in prices. But the dates associated with these increases don’t match that theory.
The worst year of COVID was 2020, the last year of Trump’s Presidency. There was no vaccine yet, and it was during this year that most of the business and school closures took place. As would be expected, there was an increase in food prices that year. But, given the circumstances, it was a rather modest 3.7%.
By 2021 we had a vaccine, people were back to work, and most schools were reopened. 2021 was also the first full year of the Biden Presidency. It was this year that food prices began to rise sharply, at a rate of 7.4%.
In 2022, COVID was behind us. However, this was the year that food prices rose the most, a stunning 11.3%. 2022 was also the first of three consecutive years of profligate spending (each year more than the last) by the Biden Administration. During this time, the national debt increased by over 6 trillion dollars.
That enormous amount of deficit spending had the secondary effects of higher interest rates and higher inflation. Also, the average increase in household incomes dropped to an average of just 1% annually from 2020 – 2024. This combined effect of higher food prices without a corresponding rise in wages made the cost of food, relative to income, feel much higher.
Bringing food prices back down is not going to be easy and may well be impossible. It is important to note that even if the CPI in the food category does not increase at all (year-over-year) and the inflation rate goes to 0.0%, food prices will remain the same. Zero inflation simply means there will be no further increases in prices. By the math, bringing prices down would require several years of negative growth in the CPI. The last time the CPI went negative, meaning that the overall index was lower than the year before, was 1954.
Other factors, like personal income increasing faster than the food CPI, would make food prices seem relatively more affordable. It appears this will happen in 2025 as annual incomes are projected to have increased by 4% while the food CPI is projected to have increased by only 2.9%. Tariffs could play a positive role as well if strategically deployed to lower food costs.
There is no mystery here. While COVID may have accounted for a small part of the rise in food prices, it was the very poorly orchestrated economic policies of the Biden Administration that was the root cause.
1 The inflation rate percentage is calculated from the CPI using this formula:
Inflation Rate = 100 * (Current Year CPI – Prior Year CPI) / Prior Year CPI
2 Responses
Excellent analysis of the real story. It’s so easy to use negative ‘feel’ rhetoric for issues like this one. The media (including FOX) is lazy. Nothing makes me more crazy than listening to a panel of those often called ‘experts’ use platitude style statements that offer no evidence of the facts. I watched recently, and heard statements like “The majority of the American people ‘feel’ Trump has not done enough to lower the cost of food” or similar ‘feel’ poll statements. So it doesn’t matter that the trend of affordability has been reversed and is heading in a positive direction under President Trump or that out of control crime is finally being managed. It only matters what the apathetic and uninformed majority ‘feel’ when asked random generic polling questions. It’s sad that the media cannot present the facts as you have so clearly done in a very understandable fashion.
Thanks Johnny, you are absolutely correct. It’s amazing to us that the media and Dems in Congress proclaim so easily that the President can bring down prices if he wanted to, as if it’s just a simple paperwork exercise. 40% of the population then instantly agrees with them that it could be done. The media and the Dems are deceptive snakes, and the 40% who blindly believe their tripe are just lazy lemmings who consciously choose not to be informed.