Thanks, Joe Biden: Cost for Fourth of July Cookout Reaches Record High Thanks to Inflation
Thanks to President Joe Biden’s inflationary policies, Americans will be paying the second highest amount ever for the traditional Fourth of July barbecue and the highest on record for overall expenses for the holiday.
The American Farm Bureau Federation found the average cost to feed a party of 10 people will be $67.73 this year, which is down 3 percent from $69.68 last year, when inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022.
Both these meal totals are up significantly from 2021.
The survey includes 12 staple items for a typical American cookout: ground beef, chicken breast, pork chops, pork and beans, hamburger buns, cheese, potato salad, chips, ice cream, strawberries, cookies and lemonade.
Save the pork chops, that looks like your standard Fourth of July picnic fare. Substituting the pork chops for pulled pork or ribs would work nicely.
Data released by the American Farm Bureau Federation shows the cost of feeding 10 people at a Fourth of July cookout is down 3% from last year. https://t.co/mo4YO7ewxV
— FOX 17 (@FOX17) June 28, 2023
The cost of lemonade fell the most from last year, down 16 percent. and the price of eggs (used in potato salad) is down 24 percent.
A report from Wells Fargo found the cost of beer is up 8 percent; soft drinks, up 14 percent; bread, up 22 percent; ice cream, up 9 percent; processed cheese, up 10 percent; and potato chips, up 15 percent.
Meanwhile, chicken breast is down 2 percent.
Average per-person spending on July 4th rose to $93.34 in 2023, which is up $9.22 from last year’s $84.12, according to a National Retail Federation survey.
Biden and the Democrats have to take a good part of the blame for the nation’s high inflation.
Now that Republicans have taken over the House of Representatives, curtailing the Bidenomics spending frenzy, inflation is back down to 4 percent, which is still much higher than the 1.4 percent it was under President Donald Trump when he left office in January 2021.
Experts said there were multiple reasons for the inflation rate hitting a forty-year high last year, but the unprecedented level of government deficit spending was definitely a contributing factor.
In a February 2021 Washington Post opinion piece, former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers predicted that passing the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, given the economy was already well into a recovery, “will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability.”
After it passed the following month, the Summers called it “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years.”
In a November 2021 piece for The New York Times, former Obama administration Treasury Department official Steven Rattner identified the American Rescue Plan as the “original sin” leading to the record high inflation by the summer of 2022..
“[The Democrats] can’t say they weren’t warned — notably by Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary and my former boss in the Obama administration, and less notably by many others, including me,” he wrote.
“We worried that shoveling an unprecedented amount of spending into an economy already on the road to recovery would mean too much money chasing too few goods,” Rattner explained.
Larry Kudlow, who was Trump’s top economist in addition to working in the Reagan administration, noted on his Fox Business program last week, “After Joe Biden’s $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was his landmark policy, a 6.5 percent [GDP growth] economy delivered by Donald Trump sputtered to a 1 percent growth rate in Biden’s first full year, 2022 and early 2023.”
“And after Trump hand-delivered a 1.4 percent inflation rate, under Bidenomics, it soared to a 9 percent inflation rate, which destroyed family affordability and worker income,” the Fox Business host said.
And the hits kept on coming under Biden when he and primarily the Democrats passed the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill in November 2021, followed by the misnamed $485 billion Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022.
If you’re wondering why your Fourth of July picnic is so expensive, look no further than Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress.
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