What’s Going On With All The Egg Shortages?
One America
The Facts
Despite hitting a wholesale peak in December and then subsequently declining, US consumer egg prices continued to go up in January, rising 8.5% month-over-month and 70.1% from a year prior, according to data released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Tuesday.
Though other grocery items also saw large price jumps, eggs were hit particularly hard due to a deadly avian flu affecting the national supply as well as higher production and transportation costs. Some producers have also been accused of price gouging as their profits have risen amid the crisis.
The Spin
Republican narrative
By not waiting for the CPI numbers to come out, or at least talking to average Americans, Biden spoke too soon at his State of the Union address when he said that "inflation is coming down." Food, energy, and housing prices — the economic trends regular people care about most — are destroying the budgets of the very same people the president is gaslighting into supporting him. The government's predictions, and therefore its policies, are having the opposite effect to what was promised.
Democratic narrative
One's reaction to this report depends on the statistical model they use. As Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has mentioned and accounted for, housing makes up the bulk of inflation, which skews the data in and of itself. Likewise, the CPI calculation summarizes average pricing from the past six months, but when compared to other industry analyses that look at more recent data, inflation is still going down, even more than it appears when adjusting for housing costs.