Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said soon “real wages are going to increase,” which will ease the affordability issues.
Host Brian Kilmeade said, “The whole thing from the off-year elections was affordability. That was the words people like Zohran Mamdani used but they’re the ways of solving that are very different from the way you would do it. So when you look at affordability now and you go grocery shopping, for example, what products are you working on bringing down? We know that certain products are down, certain up, like for example, coffee. The president says I’m going to lower the tariff rates on Brazil, Vietnam, and other places to try to bring the price of coffee down. What else do you do?”
Bessent said, “Well, it’s tough to do a lot of specific things, but I can tell you, Brian, you’re going to see substantial announcement over the next couple of days in terms of things we don’t grow here in the United States, coffee being one of them, bananas, other fruits, things like that so that that will bring the prices down very quickly. And, Brian, we inherited this affordability mess. It was the worst inflation in 40 to 50 years, one of the worst in the nation’s history. And affordability has two components. So there’s the price level and then there is income level.”
He continued, “And what happened under Biden was the cumulative inflation, stated inflation, CPI was 2,023% of what happened to working Americans. Their basket of goods and services, food, insurance, auto payments was up in the 30s, so they felt a real gigantic differential there. And what we are going to do is by bringing back high-paying manufacturing jobs, President Trump is going to do what he did in the first term, and that is for hourly workers and working Americans to have real wage increases.”
Bessent added, “Brian, imagine two lines. There is the inflation line, we’ve got that under control. It’s leveled out. That is going to start turning down. Then there’s the income line, which under Biden, because so many of the jobs or government jobs, you can’t get real wage growth from a government job. Real wages are going to increase. And I would expect in the first quarter, second quarter of next year, those two lines are going to cross, and the American people are going to start feeling better. But look, this has been a tough period.”
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