White House: High Prices Are ‘a Challenge’ But There Are ‘a Lot of’ Indications ‘People Are Optimistic’Ian Hanchett 2 Dec 2023
During an interview with Bloomberg TV on Friday, White House Council of Economic Advisers member Heather Boushey stated that higher prices are “a challenge” “and it’s taken a while for things to get to a more steady state” after the pandemic, “And I think that has been hard on folks,” but there’s “a lot of economic news that indicates that people are optimistic.”
Boushey said, [relevant remarks begin around 1:11:30] “When inflation happens, all the prices go up. And then, you’re right, even as the pace of price gains slow
over time, it doesn’t mean that prices have come back down. Now, we have seen some cases of prices coming down, and that’s important. We talked a lot over last week, over the week of Thanksgiving, that the price of affording that Thanksgiving dinner was lower than last year. That’s certainly good news for families, giving them that little bit of breathing room. We, of course, have seen energy prices coming down, gas prices have fallen $1.77 from their peak at the height of the energy crisis that was caused by the unprovoked war that Putin has been waging in…Ukraine. So, that’s also good news for consumers, where they’ve actually seen those prices come down, but it does remain a challenge.”
She continued, “One of the things that we really need to focus on is that other side of the equation. Folks have jobs. We want to see those real wage gains, which, of course, we’ve been seeing for the past six months. So, families are able to rely on that income. They’re able to have that additional income that is now higher than the pace of inflation, as the pace of inflation has come down. And that’s giving families also a little bit of breathing room on the other side. Let me say one more thing here: For the president, it’s been really important that we focus on what we can do to lower prices that families are facing. So, for example, one of the early things the president did was made it possible for people to buy their hearing aids over the counter…his competition agenda. But that is a way to lower the prices facing families for things that are really important. For all the work that the president has done to make Internet affordable and to make sure that every family has access to [the] Internet. So, there are so many different examples of prices that the president has been able to lower through specific policy actions on top of the lowering of the pace of overall inflation.”
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https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2023/12/02/white-house-high-prices-are-a-challenge-but-there-are-a-lot-of-indications-people-are-optimistic/
