A $28,000 Fact Check

Created
Tue, 20/08/2024 - 09:30
Updated
Tue, 20/08/2024 - 09:30
“Did you know the Kamala price hikes have cost the average American family $28,000?” — Donald Trump, in a TikTok video, Aug. 15 Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter. “As a result of Kamala’s inflation price hikes, they’ve cost the typical household a total of $28,000. These are numbers coming from the government. They are not coming from me.” — Trump, media event in Bedminster, N.J., Aug. 15 Former president Donald Trump rarely updates his political rhetoric — he’s using many of the same lines against Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 that he used against Joe Biden in 2020 — so it’s always news when a fresh talking point emerges. In recent days, Trump has claimed that the “average American family” or the “typical household” has suffered a hike in spending of $28,000 under the Biden presidency. Nobody knows where he got that amount and the campaign isn’t saying. They previously fact-checked a Kevin McCarthy claim that “families have lost the equivalent of $7,400 worth of income” which came from a Heritage Foundation research fellow named E.J. Antoni. It was a bogus number that made littyle sense to economists. Now, just 16 months later, as inflation is easing, Trump suddenly touts a figure almost four times McCarthy’s number. Trump claimed these were “government numbers,” but economists we contacted scratched their heads about where this could have come from. One economist suggested that Trump might have been taking total personal consumer expenditures and dividing by total households. But that doesn’t exactly match $28,000, and personal consumer…