Part 1 charted the inflation rate and the stimulus that preceded the 2021–22 surge. This page asks the question people actually live with: what have prices themselves done — since 2019, and since President Trump took office again on January 20, 2025? Five honest ways to gauge it, in actual dollars. U.S. data through June 2026.
The Consumer Price Index converted to dollars: what $100 of January-2019 purchases costs each month. This is the chart that separates "inflation is cooling" from "prices came down" — the line flattens when inflation cools, but it almost never falls. June 2026 was the rare exception: the first monthly decline since April 2020, on a 9.7% one-month drop in gas prices.
Cumulative change in consumer prices over each window, with the annualized pace for fair comparison (the current term is 17 months old). Presidents get more credit and blame for prices than they control — oil shocks, war, weather, disease, and the Fed move these numbers too — but this is the scoreboard as voters experience it.
Average U.S. shelf prices from the BLS price survey — not an index, the dollars themselves. Vertical lines mark the January 2021 and January 2025 inaugurations. The change chip on each item is since January 2025.
Sorted by change since January 20, 2025. Even the items that fell are mostly still far above their 2019 prices — the 2021–22 surge is baked in.
| Item | Jan 2019 | Jan 2021 | Jan 2025 | Jun 2026 | Since Jan '25 | Since 2019 |
|---|
Both indexed to January 2019 = 100. When the blue line (average private hourly wage) is above the gray line (consumer prices), the average hour of work buys more than it did in 2019. Prices outran paychecks from mid-2021 into 2023; wages have since clawed back to about 3.6% ahead of 2019 — but are still 0.7% behind where they stood in real terms when Biden took office in January 2021.
Change in what the average hour of work actually buys ("real wages"), by window. The answer to "are wages keeping up?" depends entirely on the start date: yes vs. 2019, no vs. the day Biden took office, barely vs. the day Trump returned.
The direct test of this week's viral argument. Grocery prices (the food-at-home CPI, orange) ran ahead of wages in 2021–23 — that squeeze was real. Since then wages have caught back up and edged ahead: groceries as a whole are up 33.2% since January 2019, wages 36.4%, everything else 32.7%. That's why "food is flat in real dollars" can be true on average while your receipt still stings.
The cleanest "real dollars" measure there is: how many minutes does the average private-sector worker have to work to buy each item — January 2019 vs. June 2026? No index, no deflator, just price ÷ hourly wage. In work-time, groceries as a whole are slightly cheaper than in 2019 — but the items people watch (beef, gas, coffee) genuinely cost more of your workday.
† Coffee is measured from January 2021 — BLS didn't publish its average price in January 2019. "All groceries" uses the food-at-home CPI against the same wage.
A viral argument this week (Matt Walsh calling the affordability crisis real; Jeremy Kauffman answering that food hasn't gotten more expensive in real dollars, and asking for evidence). Our data can referee it.
Where the "it's flat" side is right: in aggregate, groceries have tracked the broader price level almost exactly since 2019 (+33.2% vs +32.7%) and have slightly lagged wages (+36.4%) — so the average grocery basket costs about 2% less work time than it did in January 2019 (chart 6). Zoom further out and the same is true: by USDA's accounting, food's share of household income fell for half a century.
Where it's wrong, or at least incomplete: the 2021–23 squeeze was real — groceries outran paychecks for roughly two years (chart 5), and measured from January 2021 food still costs about 1.4% more work time today. USDA's own series shows Americans spent a larger share of income on food in 2022 (11.3%) than in any year since 1991. And the averages hide the items people actually track: in work-time, ground beef costs 32% more than in 2019, gasoline 34% more, coffee 64% more than in 2021, electricity and milk 7–9% more. Chicken and eggs are flat; bacon is cheaper.
Why both sides feel right: nobody buys the average. Shoppers anchor on the nominal price of salient items — and those prices are permanent ($3.80 ground beef is $6.83 forever, even if your wage caught up). The honest statement is narrow: aggregate food has roughly kept pace with wages across the whole 2019–2026 window; specific staples have not, the 2021–23 hit was real, and the recovery since is recent, uneven, and invisible on the price tag.
The overall level: up 5.1%, at a 3.6%-a-year pace. Slower than the Biden-era 5.0%/yr, roughly double the 1.9%/yr of Trump's first term, and well above the Fed's 2% target. 2026 has run hotter than 2025: the 12-month rate climbed from 2.7% in December 2025 to 4.2% in May 2026 — the highest since 2023, boosted by an oil spike after the strikes on Iran — before June's gas crash pulled it back to 3.5%.
What's up: coffee +35% (record $9.72/lb in April 2026 — drought-hit harvests in Brazil and Vietnam plus import tariffs), gasoline +31% (a $4.65 May peak during the Iran conflict, $4.20 in June), ground beef +23% (record $6.90/lb, the tightest cattle supply in decades), electricity +11% (an all-time-high 19.8¢/kWh), milk +7%.
What's down: eggs −57% from January 2025 (the avian-flu spike peaked at $6.23/dozen in March 2025; they're back to $2.14 — though still 38% above 2019), bacon −7%, bread −6%. And June 2026 delivered one genuine month of falling overall prices — the first since April 2020 — driven almost entirely by gasoline.
The honest bottom line: prices have not come down; they're rising more slowly than 2021–24 but faster than pre-COVID, and the 2021–22 surge is permanent — the basket that cost $100 in 2019 will never cost $100 again short of a depression. Meanwhile wages have — barely — kept pace since January 2025.
Sources. Consumer Price Index: BLS CPI-U, not seasonally adjusted (FRED CPIAUCNS); basket and term math computed from index levels. Everyday items: BLS Average Price Data, U.S. city average (FRED series APU000074714 gasoline, APU0000708111 eggs, APU0000703112 ground beef, APU0000717311 coffee, APU000072610 electricity, APU0000709112 milk, APU0000702111 bread, APU0000704111 bacon, APU0000FF1101 chicken breast). Groceries overall: food-at-home CPI (CUUR0000SAF11). Wages: BLS average hourly earnings, total private (CES0500000003), deflated with seasonally-adjusted CPI (CPIAUCSL); work-time prices are item price ÷ the same hourly wage. Food-share-of-income figures: USDA Economic Research Service food expenditure series. Retrieved August 4–5, 2026. October 2025 values were never published (government shutdown) and appear as gaps. Coffee average prices have additional gaps where BLS suspended collection.
Part 1 of this series: Stimulus vs. inflation, month by month. Published by Rational Ground.