From a distance, the American economy might appear to be performing well. Growth is solid, unemployment remains near historic lows and stock markets have posted large gains over the last year.
But these numbers mask the reality that most Americans see. We dug into the data, conducted surveys and talked to people around the country. Our research shows that even relatively well-off families are struggling with high prices, despite the tax cuts and wage gains that the Trump administration touts.
President Trump and Congress are neither investing in long-term solutions nor offering short-term relief. If they paid attention to different indicators of Americans’ financial health, beyond top-line growth and other traditional measures of economic success, they might feel more urgency.
So we developed one: a model budget for a family of two parents and two children under 8. We set their annual income at $130,000 — well above the roughly $83,500 national median for all U.S. households, and right in the middle of the income distribution for a family of four.
According to our calculations, the math has stopped adding up for this family over the past 18 months. They had a small cushion in 2024. Now they are in the red after covering just the basics, such as housing, an Affordable Care Act marketplace health care plan and day care. The family has over $1,000 less than it did a year and a half ago. Rising costs have more than wiped out any gains from higher wages and recent tax cuts.
This family would have trouble paying for anything beyond the basics — say, a car breaking down or a kid breaking an arm. It could not budget for any of the things that a typical family might hope for: buying a new car, taking a summer vacation or welcoming a third child.
To mount an effective response, it helps to know what stresses Americans feel most sharply and what action they expect from their elected officials. So we asked people.
By almost four to one, Americans told us that rising prices, rather than paychecks that haven’t kept up, are driving a cost-of-living squeeze. Two-thirds say they are struggling today and need relief they can feel right away. And the most cited concern is grocery costs. Some 35 percent of Americans in our survey, which we conducted last month, identified food as the single biggest source of financial pressure — approximately 15 percentage points higher than the share who named housing, the second-most-chosen option.
Respondents split almost evenly among three worries: prices that are too high; prices that change unexpectedly; and the feeling of getting less value for their money from products and services because of shrinkflation, hidden fees or declining quality. Older Americans were most likely to focus on sticker shock. Working parents were far more likely to point to volatility — the inability to predict what a week’s groceries will cost from one month to the next. And political independents were especially likely to say they felt ripped off.
Our economic indicators — the model family budget and Americans’ reported experiences — suggest that the cost of essentials has become a political and economic emergency for the nation’s elected officials. Americans want them to address the root causes driving up prices and, even more, to deliver timely relief on everyday items. Ideally, they would do both.
Our research also shows where they can start: with the goods that Americans say they have the most trouble affording. More than half of the people we surveyed named meat as their top source of grocery stress — six times the share who named the next-most-chosen source, coffee, tea or other beverages. The price of beef alone has risen by roughly a third in two years. That means a family buying just two pounds of ground beef a week is paying about $10 more every month for the same hamburgers or tacos they’ve always made.
The reasons are complex. Drought has led to the smallest U.S. cattle herd in decades. The meatpacking industry is so concentrated that it has squeezed ranchers and undermined incentives to rebuild the herd. Last year’s tariffs made beef even more expensive, and a parasite is threatening the herd across the Americas. Lowering beef prices and keeping them low requires rebuilding the herd, increasing competition in meatpacking and strengthening biosecurity. Government is not doing enough on any of these long-term goals.
Even if it were, it could take years for prices to go down, and our research suggests that the public will not want to wait. Federal and state elected leaders have a few responsible ways to deliver immediate help.
On groceries, for example, Mr. Trump should repeal tariffs that serve no strategic purpose. The eight states that put sales taxes on groceries could remove them. The ones that tax toothpaste, toilet paper and diapers could stop.
In some cases, companies — particularly those in highly concentrated industries — have used subtle methods to keep prices higher than the economic fundamentals demand. So elected officials at the federal or the state level should curb shrinkflation, pricing schemes and digital tricks that confuse and fleece consumers. They also need to require labeling that allows families to make apples-to-apples pricing comparisons and puts companies on the spot for bait-and-switch marketing.
Most of all, the country needs its elected leaders to demand rigorous, reliable data on some basic questions: After paying the bills, are families getting ahead or falling behind? Which costs are creating the most stress when families try to balance their budgets at their kitchen tables? Leaders would then make better decisions about what would make Americans’ lives easier.
Lael Brainard, a former director of the National Economic Council and former vice chair of the Federal Reserve, leads the Kitchen Table Project. Rohit Chopra, a former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is the incoming secretary of California’s Business and Consumer Services Agency.
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