CNN advised Americans watching gasoline prices slip below $4 in August 2022 to enjoy the relief. Two months earlier, regular gas had averaged $4.93 a gallon, and annual inflation had reached 9.1%. Now the network called a retreat from that misery an “unexpected form of economic stimulus,” worth thinking of as another $100 a month. At the peak of the worst inflation in four decades, the drive-by media offered a grateful shrug.
Those same outlets now describe an economy with 3.7% inflation, 6.9 million more jobs, and $11 trillion in announced investment as devastating. Their generosity seems to have expired with the Democratic administration. Compare the numbers, though, and the difference between the coverage and the record becomes difficult to explain as anything but politics.
Donald Trump promised lower prices, stronger paychecks, and a country that makes things again. He has delivered on those promises: prices are down, purchasing power is up, with 4,000 factories under construction. His record deserves comparison against Biden’s record, when inflation and gasoline prices peaked, and the Biden White House insisted the problem would cure itself.
An hour of work ought to buy more, and American industry ought to make that hour more valuable next year. GDP growth matters when it shows up in the grocery budget, rent, or mortgage payment. An investment announcement matters when a plant opens and hires people. Those are fair tests for Trump, and they are the tests on which Biden failed families watching their earnings lose ground.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases put annual inflation at 9.1% in June 2022 and 3.7% this September, down 5.4 percentage points. Core inflation, excluding food and energy, declined from 5.9% to 2.6%. Grocery inflation slowed from 12.2% to 1.8%. Slower inflation means prices are rising less quickly, not that the grocery bill has returned to its old level. Families understand that distinction without a CNN lecture. They also know that a 1.8% increase in grocery prices hurts less than a 12.2% increase. Remembering the old rate does not erase the accumulated expense; forgetting it makes the improvement disappear from the argument.
The comparison extends across household expenses. Piped natural gas inflation went from 38.4% to 5.0%; electricity from 13.7% to 4.4%; new vehicles from 11.4% to 0.6%. Household furnishings slowed from 9.5% to 1.6%, medical care from 4.5% to 1.5%. These are comparisons between two Bureau of Labor Statistics releases, not a White House slogan. They show substantial relief from the pace of increases that battered household budgets under Biden.
There are outright price declines, too. Regular gasoline averaged $4.929 in June 2022 and $4.310 this October, down 12.6%. The latest weekly reading, November 2, was $4.153, or 15.7% below Biden’s peak month. West Texas Intermediate crude averaged $114.84 a barrel then, against $102.07 now. Domestic crude production rose 16.9%, from 11.94 million barrels a day to 13.97 million. Producing more at home offers cheaper fuel without begging the Saudis or draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
A dozen large Grade A eggs cost $2.70 in June 2022 and $2.27 this September. Against the December 2022 peak of $4.25, the decline is 46.5%. The used cars and trucks index is 13.4% lower, welcome relief in a market that humiliated working families under Biden.
Private employees’ average hourly earnings increased from $32.19 in June 2022 to $38.00 this October, an 18.0% gain. Adjusted for inflation, hourly purchasing power stands about 3.2% above Biden’s peak-inflation baseline. For most of Biden’s presidency, prices outran paychecks. Under Trump, that order has reversed without the recession forecasters promised would be necessary to beat inflation. The full gain since June 2022 remains a multiyear comparison, not a measure of one president’s contribution.
Real GDP grew at a 0.6% annualized rate in the second quarter of 2022, compared with 3.4% in the third quarter of this year. Real GDP is 12.0% larger after inflation, at $24.61 trillion versus $21.98 trillion. Payrolls total 159.29 million jobs, up 6.94 million. The S&P 500 has nearly doubled from 3,785 to 7,377. None of that cancels a family’s remaining difficulties. It does make the drive-by media’s language of economic devastation look awfully selective.
Young families who felt Biden’s housing market most sharply now have more room to negotiate. New single-family home sales run at a 676,000 annual pace, up 19.9%, while the median new-home price fell from $431,700 to $400,400. Existing-home inventory increased from 1.26 million to 1.60 million, and months of supply rose from 3.0 to 4.8. A typical home sits for 33 days instead of 14. The June 2022 buyer had two weeks and little bargaining room; today he has about a month and leverage.
Renters have seen relief as well. Apartment List’s national median fell from its mid-2022 peak of $1,442 to $1,384.
reports one-bedroom asking rents in the 50 largest metros down 5.6% from their 2022 peak, with two-bedroom rents down 4.1%. These changes matter for people whose monthly bills leave little room for mistakes.
The longer-term argument rests on production. The White House’s running tally of major investment announcements is roughly $11 trillion, and the administration counts some 4,000 factories under construction. Construction matters more than a press-release total because it puts actual work behind the commitment. Investment is forward-looking by nature, and judging it requires looking beyond the next quarterly release. The roughly 4,000 construction sites matter more than the tally precisely because the country needs factories with workers inside, not another collection of promises from Washington.
Micron is spending $200 billion on American memory-chip fabrication, including a second fab. Vantage Data Centers is putting $25 billion into a 1.4 gigawatt campus in Shackelford County, Texas, with more than 5,000 jobs attached. Kraft Heinz committed $3 billion to American plant upgrades, its largest such investment in decades. Gilead added $11 billion to its domestic manufacturing plans. These commitments deserve scrutiny, but they also deserve to be counted when discussing the direction of American industry.
Trump’s policies give manufacturers reasons to build here. Tariffs make domestic production more attractive relative to shipping goods into the country, while the tax law restored 100% expensing for equipment and extended it to new factory construction. Expensing lets a business deduct qualifying costs upfront rather than spread the deduction over time. That changes the calculation for a company deciding where to put its next plant.
A chip fab takes four years from permit to wafer; a petrochemical plant takes five. The wait is real, and a pledge is no guarantee of completion. Yet the same reporters who dismiss Trump’s commitments as vapor celebrated every Biden CHIPS Act press release as a manufacturing renaissance, including projects since shelved. Apply the same scrutiny to both. One-directional skepticism is partisanship with a notebook.
The habit predates the factory announcements. In 2021 and 2022, the Biden administration called inflation “transitory,” and the drive-by media repeated it for most of a year as inflation climbed from 5% to 9%. When a Fox reporter asked Biden about inflation in January 2022, the president answered with an obscenity on a hot mic and the press corps chuckled. When gasoline crossed $5, CNN supplied silver linings. When two consecutive quarters of negative growth arrived that summer, the White House redefined recession and the networks adopted the definition within a news cycle.
By 2024, those outlets had coined the “vibecession,” treating complaints about grocery bills as a mood rather than a receipt. Now the Daily Beast advertises Trump’s “humiliating reality check” on manufacturing while 4,000 plants go up. Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media graded Biden on a curve. Trump gets a standard they never applied to his predecessor. Americans were asked to appreciate a retreat from Biden’s worst prices as an economic benefit.
Congress should make factory-structure expensing permanent before the window closes. A manufacturer choosing Ohio or Monterrey needs confidence that the rule survives the next election. The permitting reform both parties profess to favor should impose hard deadlines on federal goverment review. A 1.4 gigawatt data center needs 1.4 gigawatts of generation, and America cannot make a gas plant wait on a seven-year timeline.
The administration should publish its investment tally quarterly, plant by plant, with groundbreaking dates. Make the next CNN fact-check confront a spreadsheet, not a speech. Republican candidates should stop apologizing and recite the comparisons; the drive-by media will never do it for them. Voters remember $4.93 gas better than a thirty-second ad can remind them, so the reminders should be constant and specific.
The Democrat Party’s theory of prosperity runs through Washington: send checks, subsidize demand, then apologize when prices arrive. Trump’s wager is on production, with more oil, more plants, lower taxes on machinery, and paychecks catching up. The 2022 baseline records the failure of the first approach; the 2026 snapshot gives voters grounds to favor the second without crediting Trump for every change between them. Build the promised capacity, and Americans will have evidence harder to dismiss than a speech. Their sons and daughters will be working inside it.
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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI from Grammarly.
Excellent article and absolute truth 🙏
How can America survive allowing the media to?
Our media and the government they have ushered in are far, FAR more dangerous to America than ten Irans with nukes.