Sarah Grogan now drives 20 minutes across state lines to buy groceries for her family because a gallon of milk is cheaper in New Hampshire. A 30-year-old mother of three children under the age of 4 at South Berwick, Maine, Ms. Grogan says food inflation is making it “stressful” to feed her family.
“It’s crazy how much milk is. It’s crazy how much eggs are. But at the same time, everyone’s got to eat,” Ms. Grogan tells the Sun. “Groceries are definitely our biggest expense.”
Ms. Grogan’s husband is a police officer. She is a stay-at-home mother while she finishes nursing school. Her youngest is only two weeks old. She describes herself as lower-middle class. She considers herself luckier than most because her husband hunts for sport: deer, wild turkeys, and ducks, so they don’t have to worry about buying protein. They raise chickens for eggs.
We always have meat in the freezer,” she says. “I feel like unless you were kind of set before 2020, it’s very hard to make moves because it’s really hard to save.”
President Biden is touting a strong economy and “Bidenomics,” but only 20 percent of Americans think the economy is good, according to Gallup. The major crisis is one of affordability: Inflation is still high at 3.1 percent, even though it has eased from a peak of 9.1 percent in June 2022. Real wages — those adjusted for inflation — are not keeping apace.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released jobs numbers this morning that show non-farm wages increased 4.1 percent in the past year, which is above the inflation rate of 3.1 percent. The problem is that inflation-adjusted real hourly wages — those of the average blue-collar or middle-class person — are down 4.7 percent today from when Mr. Biden took office. That’s a weekly earnings decline in real wages to $381 in November 2023 from $399 in January 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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