(TheLastPatriotNews.com) – Joe Biden’s catastrophic performance on the economy continues to take an ever-heavier toll on Americans, as evidenced by a new inflation surge exposed by federal government data.
Inflation spiked once again in August, making it the second consecutive month to see it grow, according to the latest release from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics issued on Wednesday.
Thus, the Bureau found that the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures everyday goods’ prices, increased by 3.7% compared with August 2022.
In comparison, in July, the annual CPI increase stood at 3.2%, as reported by The Daily Caller.
The BLS data also shows that the August 2023 core CPI, which excludes energy and food, the most volatile goods categories, climbed by 4.3% year-on-year.
In July, the core CPI increase stood at 4.7% annually.
“This will be the second acceleration in a row, showing that inflation is anything but dead,” commented E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget.
“Although we’ve been told that inflation has been trending back towards 2%, that’s false. If anything, the annualized monthly data show it was trending towards 3% and is now climbing again,” the pundit noted.
The report points out that higher gasoline prices generated half of the new inflation spike, as the energy price index increased by 5.6% last month.
The price of shelter emerged as the second most significant factor contributing to the renewed inflation surge. It has been increasing non-stop for the past 40 months.
The Caller stresses that in its attempts to rein in inflation, the Fed boosted the federal funds rate to its highest since 2001, bringing it to 5.25% – 5.50%.
On September 20, the Fed is expected to announce if it would go for another rate hike.
“I expect the Fed will continue with a combination of pauses and 25-basis-point hikes for several more months while continuing to slowly run off the balance sheet,” Antoni told the news outlet.
“To put the inflation of the last two and a half years in perspective, roughly all of the household net wealth generated over that time has been confiscated by the government through the hidden tax of inflation,” he added.
