“High inflation is making your Memorial Day barbecue more expensive,” reports MSN:
Planning to have a barbecue over Memorial Day weekend this year? Prepare to shell out more money than in years past.
A new analysis published by WalletHub found the typical Memorial Day cookout this year will cost about $30, a 10% spike when compared to 2023. Driving the increase are a number of barbecue staples, including ground beef, hot dogs, steak and beer….The cost of steaks jumped 0.3% in April and is up 6.5% compared to the same time last year. Ground beef prices also rose 0.3% in April and are 6% more expensive than a year ago….hot dog prices … remain 7.1% more expensive than last year…
While inflation has fallen considerably from a peak of 9.1% in June 2022, it remains well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal. On top of that, inflation is up a stunning 19.4% when compared to January 2021, shortly before the inflation crisis began.
High inflation has created severe financial pressures for most U.S. households, which are forced to pay more for everyday necessities like food and rent. Grocery prices are up more than 21% from the start of 2021, while shelter costs are up 18.37%, according to FOX Business calculations. Energy prices, meanwhile, are up 38.4.%.
Inflation is higher now than when Joe Biden took office, due to the massive federal spending increases he supported and signed into law. But Biden lies about this, claiming inflation fell after he took office (the inflation rate was 1.4% when Biden was inaugurated, lower than it is now).
In 2021, the Biden administration falsely claimed that the cost of a July 4th cookout had gone down by 16 cents, when in fact it had gone up, as the National Retail Federation noted, and data sets from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics showed. As the Daily Wire observed, “NRF found that the price actually increased by more than $4 from 2020 to 2021.” Moreover, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported “a 10.9% increase in the price of consumer food goods from July 2021 to July 2022, the largest increase over 12 months since May 1979. BLS notes that ‘prices for food at home rose 13.1 percent,’ while there was a 7.9% increase in the cost of food away from home in the 12-month span.”
President Biden’s policies caused inflation, according to even Democratic economists like Harvard’s Larry Summers — who was Treasury Secretary under President Clinton — and Obama advisor Steven Rattner. As Rattner noted in the New York Times, Biden has spent “an unprecedented amount” of taxpayer money, which resulted in “too much money chasing too few goods.”
