Inflation is close to 6% year over year, and the price of just about everything appears to be on the rise. | Stock Photo
Inflation is close to 6% year over year, and the price of just about everything appears to be on the rise. | Stock Photo
U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania) gave his thoughts on the price of inflation after its steady increase lately.
According to a July 13 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost of living has increased 5.4% over the past 12 months.
“President Biden is now joining the Fed in insisting this bout of inflation is transitory,” Toomey said in a July 19 Twitter post. “But if it’s not, waiting for it to pass will put the Fed behind the curve. It's very difficult to get the inflation genie back in the bottle once it’s out.”
U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey
| Wikimedia Commons
According to Bloomberg, seniors could see a boost of over 6% to their Social Security checks due to the rising inflation and how their payments are calculated.
“One data point doesn’t make a trend, but when you have three in a row, at some point it does become significant,” Aneta Markowska, chief financial economist at Jefferies, told Bloomberg. “We haven’t seen this strength, breadth and persistence of inflation since the 1980s.”
Inflation rose 0.9% in the previous month alone, according to the same U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report.
According to Market Watch, the cost of used cars rose 10.5% in June, accounting for more than one-third of the increases for the month.
The Biden administration has proposed a 2.7% increase in government pay, but the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) are proposing a more aggressive approach of a 3.2% federal employee pay increase.
“Certainly the White House’s 2.7% proposal is a welcome start to the debate over what federal employees deserve next year, but there is plenty of time for the administration and Congress to reconsider and give frontline federal workers an average 3.2%,” NTEU President Tony Reardon said, according to Federal News Network.
“We want to make up some ground,” Jacqueline Simon, policy director at AFGE, told Bloomberg. “It was a modest proposal when it was put together before the economy really started to recover. It just becomes more urgent when prices start to rise.”
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