AENN
Written by Chriss W. Street
Shasta County, CA – The Washington Post, CBS and the New York Times are baffled that with official inflation rates down, working class voters keep saying inflation is their top concern. What the working class see is that interest rates on their credit cards is still going up.Voters heading to the polls know that according to the government’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) of inflation under Biden-Harris administration’s first 45 months was up 20.1%, versus just 7.1% for the same period under Trump. That means the average annual Consumer Price Index rose 5.4% under Biden-Harris and 1.9% under Trump.
Mainstream media claims that Biden-Harris CPI peak was at about 9.1% in June 2022, and the Federal Reserve’s large mid-September half point cut in the interest rate it charges to banks must mean CPI inflation must be falling fast.
But no working class family consumes CPI, which only tracks the price of goods and services purchased by an average consumer. Politicians tweaked the CPI index in 1983 to exclude the cost of borrowing money and interest rates charges on credit cards.
Average voter knows the credit card average interest rate when Trump left office in January 2021 was 16.43% and rose to 18.43% at the supposed CPI peak in June 2022. But when they opened their credit card statements last month the average annual credit card interest rate had spiked big-time to 23.37%. Retail store average credit card interest rate hit a grim high of 28.93%, with some charging as high as 33.24%.
Before the pre-election rate cut, the Federal Reserve had issued a series of 11 rate hikes, for the fastest percentage increase in U.S. history. Card Ratings.com survey found that only about 37% of credit card companies have followed the Fed rate cut with tiny interest reductions, while 63% of credit card interest rates are unchanged or higher.
This graph reveals what CPI inflation would have been if interest cost were added back:
New York Times headline asks:: “Inflation Is Basically Back To Normal, Why Do Voters Still Feel Blah.” What the Times is really asking working class American voters to “stop believing their own lying eyes” about the inflation they are personally suffering
