…
Ms Ellis works full-time as a nurse’s assistant and has a second part-time job.
But she needs to economise. She has switched stores, cut out brand-name items like Dove soap and Stroehmann bread, and all but said goodbye to her favourite Chick-fil-A sandwich.
Still, Ms Ellis has sometimes turned to risky payday loans (short-term borrowing with high interest rates) as she grapples with grocery prices that have surged 25% since Mr Biden entered office in January 2021.
“Prior to inflation,” she says, “I didn’t have any debt, I didn’t have any credit cards, never applied for like a payday loan or any of those things. But since inflation, I needed to do all those things…I’ve had to downgrade my life completely.”
The leap in grocery prices has outpaced the historic 20% rise in living costs that followed the pandemic, squeezing households around the country and fuelling widespread economic and political discontent.
This is why I worry that Republicans will win: bc they have mastered the “truth” that facts don’t matter so much as campaign commercials.
And apparently journalists also, e.g. that line "They can’t buy groceries anymore. They can’t.” - I mean… there are cheaper options that don’t involve going into debt to purchase goods on a literally weekly basis.
Even here in the Fediverse, we send them clicks and spread the message for them. E.g. when the woman says:
Whereas in response the reporter tried to be “fair & balanced” by saying that:
There is no reason to give either of these statements the time or day, but instead they spread them as “newsworthy”.
I guess it’s my own fault for remaining subscribed to this community, if this is the content that regularly appears here.
As a note: you did notice this is from the BBC, right? As in the British Broadcasting Company?
I’m not entirely sure the BBC is Republican-captured media, though I’ll tend to agree that their style guide leads to reading an awful lot like conservative media.
Thing is a lot of the media corpo right came out of britain, australia, and canada. IE murdock, black. They found they could grow the stuff better in the US and then it made it easier to take root once they export it to the more liberal countries.
Such a misleading way the story is written. Also a failure to mention that inflation was a global phenomenon, that it was brought down faster in America than most other places, that it was able to be brought down without a recession as was widely predicted which would have been far more devastating, that wage growth has compensated for inflation and then some, that wage growth was highest for hourly and low income workers, and a failure to mention the responses made by congress and the president to help inflation. So much important context left out.
Barely a mention of the fact that all of Trump’s polices are the exact opposite of what you would do to help inflation. That his tarrifs alone will raise this person’s costs by $1700 a year. Why don’t they ask her what she thinks of Trump’s tarrifs costing her $1700 more a year if he takes office? They could mention how his first term policies including pressuring the federal reserve for unnecessarily low rates created a dangerous environment for inflation before the pandemic kicked it off.
But all they can say is, just, I dunno, inflation was fine when Biden took office. In March 2021 prices were already increasing by 0.6% a month from the month before, a 4.8% annualized rate. Comparing to the year before is an average of the past 12 months of change combined. The month to month rate is a much better way to see how it’s changing when it’s changing rapidly. They were begining to accelerate before Biden did much of anything, and not to mention this occurred simultaneously around most of the globe.
Anyways, journalists can’t be bothered I guess. Everyone always wonders why people think Republicans are better for the economy despite all the evidence to contrary. I think a lot of it is lazy journalism that just regurgitates opinions and polling instead of researching facts.