Discussion on the increasing expenses in the US since 2020, including grocery bills, utilities, and credit card debt interest. Despite a 20% increase in wages, adjusted for inflation, wages have barely risen, leading to a significant gap between expenses and income.
The cost of living in America has increased significantly since 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic triggered a sudden deceleration of the world’s largest economy. Three years later, the spike in inflation that followed is finally easing as the US Federal Reserve aims optimistically for a soft landing.
But that doesn’t mean the price of goods and services is falling back to Earth—at least not right away. Bloomberg reporters Reade Pickert and Jennah Haque crunched the numbers to see just how much more Americans are shouldering in their everyday expenses compared with pre-pandemic levels.
Read more: Just How Bad Is the US Cost-of-Living Squeeze? We Did the Math
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