The most startling moment in the CNN debate last week between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump was not from the candidates. It was from moderator Jake Tapper, who said with a straight face as if it were just the science that grocery prices were up by 20 percent since President Biden was elected.
I had a hard time getting past that moment, and I suspect that many watchers did too. Just by the way, even if the current rate is lower than the past rate, that doesn’t mean that prices are falling. It means that they are rising more slowly. For some reason, maybe people, even professional journalists, don’t seem to understand that point.
Millions were watching. Intuition tells me that millions of people were stunned and thought to themselves or said out loud: no way. Truly, is there a single living soul in America who lives on a budget, watches their spending, and who believes that their grocery bills are only up by 20 percent in three years?
