“Did you know the Kamala price hikes have cost the average American family $28,000?”
— Donald Trump, in a TikTok video, Aug. 15
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“As a result of Kamala’s inflation price hikes, they’ve cost the typical household a total of $28,000. These are numbers coming from the government. They are not coming from me.”
— Trump, media event in Bedminster, N.J., Aug. 15
Former president Donald Trump rarely updates his political rhetoric — he’s using many of the same lines against Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 that he used against Joe Biden in 2020 — so it’s always news when a fresh talking point emerges.
In recent days, Trump has claimed that the “average American family” or the “typical household” has suffered a hike in spending of $28,000 under the Biden presidency.
Nobody knows where he got that amount and the campaign isn’t saying.
They previously fact-checked a Kevin McCarthy claim that “families have lost the equivalent of $7,400 worth of income” which came from a Heritage Foundation research fellow named E.J. Antoni. It was a bogus number that made littyle sense to economists.
Now, just 16 months later, as inflation is easing, Trump suddenly touts a figure almost four times McCarthy’s number. Trump claimed these were “government numbers,” but economists we contacted scratched their heads about where this could have come from.
One economist suggested that Trump might have been taking total personal consumer expenditures and dividing by total households. But that doesn’t exactly match $28,000, and personal consumer expenditures includes items (stuff the government buys for people like health care,for example) that would exaggerate the impact.
In any case, the experts said Trump is ignoring income gains that have accompanied the rise in prices, putting the finances of many Americans in the net positive territory.
Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, for instance, provided a spreadsheet of data on real personal income less transfer payments from the government per capita. “It has increased 4.2 percent between January 2021 and June 2024,” he said in an email. “A little more than one percent per annum. A solid performance.”
They eventually found the number in a blog post by the same Heritage fellow which doesn’t really add up either. And honestly, I’m pretty sure Trump just pulled that out of his hair helmet. It’s not like he cares about providing any back-up.
And in any case, it’s the opposite of reality:
Oddly, when Bankrate.com conducted this same survey in 2023, Americans said they needed $233,000 a year to be financially secure. So in one year, the surveys indicated a $47,000 improvement — perhaps a sign that as inflation eased, Americans felt less stressed about their finances. A representative for Bankrate.com did not respond to a request for comment.
Ya think?