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cost of living
'Trump Is Making Your Life More Expensive': Tariff Chaos Engulfs US Economy
“Poor and working people are paying the price" of the president's tariff policies, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
Sep 16, 2025
US consumers are increasingly feeling the impact of President Donald Trump's tariffs, and the head of the Congressional Budget Office said on Monday that they are fueling inflation.
During an appearance on CNBC, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Phillip Swagel said that the president's tariffs have pushed up inflation more than the agency initially anticipated, although he emphasized that their impact on inflation so far was "not by a lot, but by enough to show" in the numbers.
Swagel also said that the higher-than-expected inflation was a surprise because there are signs that the US economy has slowed significantly since January.
CNN on Tuesday published an analysis using numbers from the Yale Budget Lab estimating that Trump's tariffs will cost US households an average of $2,300 extra per year, which is nearly three times as much as the $800 US households are projected to receive on average from new tax provisions contained in the Republicans' "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that passed earlier this year.
The combined distributional impacts of the Trump tariffs and the GOP tax law are also highly regressive. According to CNN's analysis, a household with annual earnings of $38,840 would be $2,560 worse off thanks to the tariffs and the tax law, while households earning $517,700 would be $8,180 better off.
The Washington Post on Tuesday reported that Trump's tariffs aren't just hurting Americans in the US, but those living abroad as well.
As explained by the Post, Americans living abroad have been unable to send mail to the US without paying hefty fines thanks to the chaos being caused by Trump's tariffs. The reason for this, writes the paper, is that Trump earlier this year canceled a policy known as the de minimis exemption, effective August 29, that "allowed the tariff-free flow of goods under $800 into the United States."
This has led not just to increased shipping costs for Americans living abroad, but has also resulted in foreign nations slowing or even outright halting shipments to the US because they are unsure about how to calculate the costs.
"Confusion about the rules have led to issues since the exemption was lifted on August 29," the Post wrote. "At first, national postal services in more than 30 countries temporarily suspended sending some or most US-bound packages. Since then, restrictions have eased, and the Universal Postal Union deployed a tool this week to help operators calculate duties and resume services."
Reacting to fresh revelations about the impact of the tariffs, many progressive Democrats hammered Trump for increasing the cost of living for working-class families.
"Under Donald Trump’s economy: coffee is up 26%, beef is up 14%, oranges are up 17%, bananas are up 6%, chicken is up 6%, chocolate chip cookies are up 5%, potato chips are up 4%, milk is up 4%," wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). "But average worker pay is only up 2%. Trumpflation is eating up your paycheck."
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) added that “from school supplies to gas to groceries, Trump is making your life more expensive."
"Poor and working people are paying the price of his reckless policies," said the congresswoman.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, took to the Senate floor on Monday to single out a different Trump policy that he said was also raising prices for US consumers—namely, his attacks on green energy projects.
"This administration is shamelessly working to block one of our best defenses against rising energy bills: renewable energy," Padilla said. "And I say so because renewable energy is absolutely affordable, renewable energy is abundant, and whether you want to admit it or not, renewable energy sources are our future."
The senator also pointed to his home state of California as an example of what can happen when the government encourages the development of green energy projects.
"[California is] harnessing the power of solar and wind and hydroelectric power and nuclear, geothermal, even hydrogen power to our state," he said. "And it’s exactly because of those investments that even in a year like 2024, just last year, when we experienced record heatwaves that we also saw record renewable energy generation, and we kept the lights on."
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Don’t Put a Social Security Hater in Charge of Our Economic Data
With the nomination of EJ Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there is reason to be fearful of the Trump administration massaging or outright falsifying key economic statistics that help determine crucial benefits.
Aug 13, 2025
On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump nominated EJ Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS. The nomination came 10 days after Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, baselessly accusing her of having “rigged” the July jobs report, which showed a slowing labor market and contained large downward revisions to payroll employment for the previous two months. Antoni, in line with Trump’s false assertions of fraud, has proposed halting the monthly jobs report entirely.
Antoni is not the sort of figure you want at the helm of a statistical agency. He has a long history of egregiously misrepresenting BLS data or, perhaps worse, misunderstanding it in extremely basic ways. He has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and said that we “need to sunset the program.” His nomination has been panned by figures across the political spectrum. Stan Veuger of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, for instance, minced no words in his statement to The Washington Post: “He’s utterly unqualified and as partisan as it gets.”
The partisan transformation of BLS holds untold dangers, given that BLS data is baked into our economic policy. Policymakers look at the rates of unemployment and inflation when setting policy, of course, but by law, several BLS data series also provide for the automatic adjustment of social insurance programs and welfare benefits. Juking the stats could harm the massive number of people that make use of these programs.
How Inflation Data Affects Your Income
The most obvious way that BLS data affects our safety net is through the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) afforded to retirees on Social Security—an annual benefit boost meant to keep up with inflation. The COLA is calculated using BLS’ Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), and in addition to retirees, people on Social Security Disability Insurance, Supplemental Security Income, and Veterans Disability Compensation receive COLAs. For many of the people on these programs, the benefits make up a significant chunk of their income. Roughly 40% of Social Security recipients receive more than 50% of their income from the program, for instance.
CPI data affects a number of other benefit programs as well. The Department of Agriculture uses CPI data to determine the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan, which is in turn used to calculate benefit allotments for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. The Department of Housing and Urban Development uses CPI data in the calculation of Fair Market Rents, a metric which determines the benefit amount for housing vouchers, among other applications. Eligibility for SNAP, Medicaid, and (in most states) Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is tied to the federal poverty level, which the Department of Health and Human Services updates annually using CPI data.
If Antoni is able to make inflation look artificially low to benefit Trump politically, anyone who receives any kind of inflation-adjusted income should feel cheated.
In all, according to the Bureau, “The CPI affects the income of more than 108 million people because of statutory action.” In other words, one-third of Americans have a source of income whose relationship to BLS data is written in the law. Virtually all of us will at some point in our lives receive benefits for which this is the case—assuming that Antoni is unsuccessful in sunsetting Social Security. The relationship between the CPI and your income also extends beyond public benefits: It is widely used in employment contracts, for example, for workers’ annual cost-of-living raises (especially in unionized workplaces).
Manipulating the stats is easier said than done, but if Antoni is able to make inflation look artificially low to benefit Trump politically, anyone who receives any kind of inflation-adjusted income should feel cheated.
How Jobs Data Affects Your Ability to Access Unemployment Insurance
In several states, the duration of state-level unemployment insurance benefits varies according to the state’s unemployment rate (recall that Trump fired Commissioner McEntarfer over the jobs numbers). In Florida and Georgia, residents are currently capped at 12 weeks of unemployment insurance based on their low unemployment rates (the standard in other states is 26 weeks). In April, Massachusetts extended the maximum duration of unemployment insurance from 26 weeks to 30 weeks based on its statutory trigger: that one of its metro areas had an unemployment rate greater than 5.1%. To make that determination, it used BLS’ Local Area Unemployment Statistics program.
At the federal level, we also have an extended benefits program, which provides 13 additional weeks of unemployment insurance to workers in states dealing with high unemployment. States are required to use an “insured unemployment rate” trigger, which turns “on” when a large portion of workers within the state are receiving unemployment insurance—calculated by states using the BLS’ Quarterly Census of Earnings and Wages. States can also adopt various optional triggers, all of which use BLS data in some way.
(BLS data serves as an input into much more than I am able to specify here. If you want to learn more, I recommend checking out the BLS’ Handbook of Methods. Pick a subject area, then a survey, then navigate to the “presentation” tab, where BLS often cites examples of how the data you have selected tends to be used—by researchers, agencies, the private sector, and more.)
EJ Antoni Doesn’t Care About Your Income; He Cares About Keeping Trump Happy
With the nomination of EJ Antoni to lead BLS, there is reason to be fearful of the Trump administration massaging or outright falsifying key economic statistics. Antoni cannot be trusted to run the BLS as an independent, nonpartisan body, and we should watch the data accordingly. If Antoni can rig things to make the economy look better for Trump, bad data will feed into a system that takes these estimates at face value. Inflation is low, says Trump, so your COLA is low. Unemployment is low, says Trump, so you can’t remain on unemployment insurance.
Antoni certainly doesn’t seem to care if you lose out on some of the benefits you are duly owed. In a 2018 article co-written with Stephen Moore, Antoni said that “the cost of welfare” is “disgusting” and advocated for the government to “moderately and slowly cut benefits so that, over time, some programs can be eliminated.” (They declined to say which programs.)
Much of the law governing our safety net depends on assumptions that Trump has brought into question: that our economic data is sound, and that the civil servants producing it are impartial, rigorous, and dedicated to the data itself.
The BLS is also already struggling in ways that Antoni is likely to make worse. Trump’s hiring freeze has impeded the agency’s data collection efforts, as BLS and the Census Bureau, which collects the data for many of BLS’ surveys, have both lost many staffers. As a result, BLS has reduced data collection for the CPI substantially in recent months, and it has discontinued some 350 indexes in the Producer Price Index. This decline in data quality poses its own threat to our economic data, apart from Trump’s desire to see good numbers.
Antoni, for his part, has praised the Department of Government Efficiency’s mass firings of civil servants and in November advocated for DOGE to “take a chainsaw to the BLS.” Those comments suggest he’ll be disinclined to address—or even acknowledge—the understaffing problem.
Much of the law governing our safety net depends on assumptions that Trump has brought into question: that our economic data is sound, and that the civil servants producing it are impartial, rigorous, and dedicated to the data itself. If EJ Antoni is confirmed as BLS Commissioner, we will all have one more reason to fear for our economic security.
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Campaign's Interactive Tool Tracks How Much Trump and GOP Are Raising the Cost of Living
"Trump and Republicans in Congress are single-handedly inflating the cost of everyday items that Americans rely on," said one advocate.
Jul 31, 2025
Six months into U.S. President Donald Trump's second term, an economic justice group on Thursday unveiled an interactive tool to help Americans put a number on the unmistakable feeling many have reported having about the Republican leader who promised to "make America affordable again": that costs have in fact gone up under Trump, and that the White House and the GOP are to blame.
Using the tool introduced by Unrig Our Economy, people across the U.S. can see exactly how much the price of essentials has gone up in their state, with the advocacy group connecting the dots between the rising cost of living and Trump's tariffs as well as corporate tax breaks Republicans have relentlessly pushed to pass.
According to the "Don't Inflate Our Plates" tool, the price of beef in Texas has gone up nearly 47% since the early days of Trump's second term, while eggs cost $3.19 more than they did before Trump took office.
In California, eggs now cost over $5.00 more than they did before Trump's second term, based on "historical trends, real-time supplier data, and market analysis" that Unrig Our Economy examined.
Unrig Our Economy gained some of its data from Kroger's pricing data, finding that in states with Kroger stores, the price of beef has gone up between 16% and 72%, with the biggest price hikes in Alaska and Utah.
Egg prices in particular were a talking point for Trump during his presidential campaign, but they've risen in many states where Kroger operates, with customers in Michigan—where the president won in 2024—paying 58% more for eggs.
"Trump and Republicans in Congress are singlehandedly inflating the cost of everyday items that Americans rely on," said Leor Tal, campaign director for Unrig Our Economy. "While billionaires and corporations cash in on Republican-backed tax breaks, working-class families are left paying higher prices for eggs, coffee, and more."
Unrig Our Economy pointed to reporting on Trump's tariffs, more of which are set to be announced Friday, with the president expected to impose rates up to 50% on some imports.
As Common Dreams reported this week, the advocacy group Groundwork Collaborative found that just as corporate executives used labor shortages and supply chain disruptions during the coronavirus pandemic as cover to keep prices high even after those problems were resolved, many are now using tariffs as a justification for price increases.
"We certainly welcome a reduction in the Chinese tariffs, but we'll be announcing a price increase here regardless of any changes of the Chinese tariffs over the next week or two to go into effect in June," the CEO of one footwear brand said in a recent earnings call.
Unrig Our Economy pointed to recent polling that showed Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump's tariffs, including 47% of Republican voters.
The Trump administration has also made a number of regulatory moves benefiting corporations that aim to take as much money from working families' household budgets as possible, including a push for the cancellation of a Biden-era Federal Trade Commission rule allowing consumers to easily cancel subscriptions; the FTC's decision to drop a lawsuit challenging price discrimination by PepsiCo; and the commission's move shutting down public comments on corporate pricing tactics.
The interactive tool was unveiled weeks after the president signed into law his sweeping domestic policy and budget package, which includes the largest cuts to public programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in history, increases monthly payments for student loan borrowers under repayment assistance plans, and hands out $117 billion in tax cuts to the richest 1% of Americans while providing just $77 billion in cumulative savings to the bottom 60% of earners.
As Unrig Our Economy unveiled its tool allowing Americans to see exactly how their household budgets are being impacted under the Trump administration, the Century Foundation (TCF) and Morning Consult released the results of a poll in which they asked more than 2,000 people in June how they were being affected by the high cost of living over the past six months.
More than half of respondents said "billionaires, corporations, and congressional Republicans have made their lives harder," and 60% said the Trump administration is to blame for the higher cost of living.
More than 4 in 5 Americans said they were concerned about the price of groceries, and nearly half were concerned about their ability to pay their rent or mortgage. Forty-eight percent said they would have difficulty paying an unexpected $500 bill, like a home repair or medical bill, without borrowing or using credit, and nearly 20% said it would be "very difficult" to make the payment.
Even among households with incomes over $100,000, more than a third said they would have a hard time meeting the surprise expense without dipping into savings or using credit cards—suggesting that these households are using a large proportion of their relatively comfortable monthly income for essentials
"While the federal government tears down programs such as Medicaid and food assistance and federal regulators give the green light to companies to rip off consumers, families are being forced to construct their own safety nets from a web of risky financial practices," said TCF.
Unrig the Economy said that with Don't Inflate Our Plates, the group is calling out "the Republican-backed policies that got us here" and demanding "that Congress put working people first."
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