Stop Whining. Do Something.
By Chuck Melvin
Sept. 13, 2024
I almost never use exclamation points, but here’s one:
Stop whining about inflation! This especially means you, Donald Trump, but you too, Kamala Harris.
Inflation is all but over — which doesn’t mean prices are back where they were five or 10 years ago. That would be a bad thing called “deflation.” It just means that the prices of things like gas and groceries have mostly stabilized after bubbling up because of COVID-19.
Let me say that again: Prices appear to be settling into a normal pattern after they jumped in 2021 and 2022 because of COVID. To be clear, they didn’t spike because of Donald Trump, unless you think he completely bungled the pandemic. Or because of Joe Biden. And certainly not because of Kamala Harris.
There’s even a cherry on top of all this. While prices were rising during the past few years, wages for many of us were climbing even faster. That’s right: It may not feel like it, but on average, we actually came out ahead.
Don’t believe me? Here are the numbers — just a few, so your eyes don’t glaze over.
The Consumer Price Index, the most-watched measure of costs in the United States, rose a total of 21% from January of 2020 through March of this year. The ugliest month was June of 2022, when U.S. inflation peaked at 9.1%, the worst month in four decades.
There were all sorts of reasons for that, but two stand out:
As COVID eased, people wanted to buy stuff that hadn’t been made yet because production had shut down during the pandemic. Too much demand, plus not enough supply, equals higher prices.
In February of 2022, Russia, a major oil supplier, invaded Ukraine, a major food supplier. So on the heels of COVID’s economic disruptions, the prices of wheat, oil and other commodities rose sharply.
Notably, Europe’s inflation was worse than ours — in some countries, much worse — which makes it hard to fathom how Trump could reasonably blame Biden and Harris for causing inflation. COVID and the Russia-Ukraine war were the clear economic disruptors, here and globally.
Since then, U.S. inflation has returned almost to normal: The Consumer Price Index rose just 2.9% during the 12-month period that ended in July — exactly the same inflation figure registered in July of 2018, near the middle of Trump’s term as president.
If you didn’t get a raise during the last couple of years, talk to your boss now. It’s way overdue.
From the first quarter of 2020 through the first three months of this year, the average weekly earnings of America’s hourly workers rose a total of 25%. That’s according to the widely watched Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I’ll recap the math for you. Wages were up 25% during the same period that prices rose 21%.
Worth noting: There are multiple ways to measure both inflation and wage growth. But all of them show that pay raises were either close to the inflation rate — or they beat it.
Plenty of other stats offer similar pictures of an American economy that so far has withstood COVID and the fiscal turbulence that followed:
GDP (gross domestic product), a picture of the overall economy, resumed growing in 2021 after tanking in 2020.
U.S. employers have added jobs for 44 straight months.
Unemployment averaged an ugly 6.7% in 2020, when COVID shutdowns put millions of people out of work temporarily. Those factories, stores, restaurants and bars mostly reopened by 2021, pushing unemployment back down to a normal 3.9%.
Interest rates are up since the Federal Reserve pushed rates higher to rein in inflation, a strategy that seems to be working — although homebuyers are facing higher mortgage rates as a result. An interest rate reduction appears all but certain this month.
Let’s see how this is all playing out in Cedarburg, my adopted hometown and (warning: shameless plug ahead) one of Wisconsin’s most charming places to visit, dine and shop.
At the northern and southern edges of the city, homes and townhouses are sprouting like spring dandelions. The historic downtown seems to be humming along, with barely a vacant storefront to be found. The city’s annual festivals, celebrating strawberries and harvests and the Fourth of July, have rebounded from the pandemic. Summer weekends are filled with live music booming from the park pavilion alongside Cedar Creek.
None of it looks like the economic doom and gloom portrayed in those finger-pointing political ads on TV and the internet.
“This to me is the most normal summer we’ve had since the pandemic,” Maggie Dobson, the executive director of the Cedarburg Chamber of Commerce, told me the other day. “It took a couple of years to kind of crawl out of that.”
To be sure, there are still some bumps in Cedarburg’s economic road. Dobson said some shopkeepers told her they’ve had “rough summers” this year, possibly a remnant of inflation as cautious tourists do more “window-shopping and not necessarily buying.”
Another issue, she said, is a shortage of workers. Some restaurants and shops have had to reduce the number of hours or days that they’re open because the workforce they once relied on — high school students working after school and on weekends — has grown busier with extracurricular activities.
“We live in an age where people are extremely over-scheduled,” Dobson said. “Sports for younger people are not seasonal anymore. My own daughter is the same way. That eliminates their ability to work on a regular basis.”
On the upside, though, I wasn’t hallucinating when I noticed that Cedarburg seemed to be getting busier. In 2023, more than 465,000 visitors made an estimated 2 million trips to the city’s downtown area, according to statistics collected using cell phone data that distinguishes local phones from those of tourists. Both figures surpassed highs dating back to 2017.
Also, room taxes collected from overnight stays in the city (more than $115,000 annually) and membership in the Chamber of Commerce (370 businesses) have exceeded pre-COVID totals.
So, as politicians fuss at each other about a rotten economy that isn’t really all that bad, who should get credit for what’s going right in the country — and in Cedarburg?
In a job that requires her to work with people of all political stripes, the affable Dobson knows better than to talk politics with a journalist.
“I don’t think it’s worth getting into that,” she said.