The general price level went up a little in September, so Thursday’s inflation report did not have the good news that Vice President Kamala Harris might have been hoping for.
Aside from the rise in prices, the number of jobless claims hit a 14-month high last week, with 258,000 claims being made. Even so, the job market was still strong; 254,000 new jobs were added in the last month, which was more than expected.
The long awaited September inflation data
The consumer price index (CPI) went up by 0.2% in September, according to the U.S. Labor Department. This means that the annual inflation rate is now 2.4%. According to Fox Business, this was a little higher than what experts had predicted—a 0.1% rise for the month that would lead to a 2.3% annual rate.
Also, core inflation, which doesn’t include volatile prices for things like food and energy, went up by 0.3%, for a 3.3% annual rate, which was higher than the 0.2% experts thought it would be. Core inflation includes things like rent, car insurance, health care, clothes, and plane tickets. It shows how changes in these basic costs affect people’s budgets.
Prices are still higher than they were when President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris first took office, even though inflation has gone down a lot since its all-time high of over 9% in 2022. Recently conducted polls show that people are very concerned about the economy, and this is because prices have stayed high for a long time.
A Gallup poll released earlier this week made it clear that the economy is the main problem that voters are thinking about before the election. 52% of those who answered said that the candidates’ views on the economy would be “extremely important” in deciding how they would vote.
This is the biggest percentage since the 2008 economic downturn. 38% of voters also said the economy was “very important” to them when they made their choice. The poll was done with 1,023 registered voters from September 16–28, and there was a +/–4% margin of error.
That same poll also showed that most people think former President Donald Trump is better at running the economy than Harris (54% favored Trump to 45% favored Harris).
Democratic researcher and CEO of Schoen Cooperman Research Carly Cooperman said that Harris has done better than Biden in terms of how people see the economy, but she also said that voters are still having a hard time with high day-to-day costs.
“While Harris is doing better than Biden did against Trump when it comes to handling the economy—maybe because she is a newer candidate—voters still think that day-to-day costs are high, so this news [of a lower annual inflation rate] won’t help her all that much.”
In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday, Trump talked about inflation and criticized how the Biden-Harris government was running the economy. “When I left office four years ago, there was no inflation, and there was…almost no inflation during my four years in office.”
Trump said, “The economy has been a disaster under Biden and Harris because of inflation, but Kamala says she can’t think of a single thing she would do differently.” He also said that the recent rise in the stock market was due to his better polling numbers, citing praise from Wall Street expert Scott Bessent.
Prices were going up by 1.4% when Trump left office in January 2021. By April of that year, it had reached 4.2%, and it kept going up all through the next year. Many experts, across the political spectrum, said that the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed by Democrats in March 2021 would cause inflation to rise, even though the economy was already in the process of recovering.
Vice President Harris was very important in getting this bill passed; he cast the deciding vote in the Senate, even though Republicans did not back the bill.