Prices are rising for many Americans, with 65% of consumers saying the increases are outpacing their income, according to a J.D. Power survey of 4,000 U.S. adults conducted in February 2026.
Recent inflation data adds to that pressure, with the annual rate rising from 2.4% in February to 3.3% in March, according to consumer price index data released Friday. The increase was driven largely by a surge in energy costs as gasoline prices spiked amid the Iran war. Gasoline prices rose 21.2% in March, accounting for nearly three-quarters of the overall increase, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
IMHO America has way more Inflation than the Offical Figures.
Because the Official Inflation is matemathically related to the Official GDP (which is the Real GDP, calculated from the Nominal - in USD - GDP by deflating it using the Inflation rate, so more inflation means less GDP), it’s a Politically Important number, complex to determine, with a lot of room for rigging (just change the composition of the “basket” used to calculate it, plus there’s a big difference between including or not Housing costs), generally considered good if small and gets less focus than GDP (GDP Growth is widelly paraded by ruling politicians as a measure of their success, Inflation much less so), so I suspect the political pressure to make Official Inflation figures small is HUGE.
As far as I can tell that official figure has been heavilly rigged for quite a while (though I expect that in Trump’s America it’s worse), hence why the blue collar worker salary which could pay for a house, a car and all the expenses of family of 5 by itself back in the 60s and which according to Inflation has around the same real value as a blue collar worker salary nowadays, can’t pay for anywhere close to that anymore.
(By the way, this is not just a problem in America - you can see the same in Europe - it’s just that judging by the growth in housing costs, food prices and salaries in certain areas, America seems to have had way more inflation since 2008 than Europe).