On Fox News Channel's “Fox & Friends” Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that “real wages will soon increase,” easing the affordability problem.
Host Brian Kilmeade said: “The whole point of the off-year election was affordability. Those were the words that people like Zoran Mamdani used, but these are ways of dealing with them that are very different from how you would do it. So when you look at affordability now and you go grocery shopping, like what products are you working on cutting? We know some products are going down, some are going up, like coffee. The President says I'm going to cut tariff rates for Brazil, Vietnam and other places.” where you can try to reduce the price of coffee. What else are you doing?”
Bessent said, “Well, it's hard to do a lot of specific things, but I can tell you, Brian, that over the next few days you're going to see significant announcements regarding things that we don't grow here in the United States, including coffee, bananas, other fruits and the like, so that's going to drive prices down very quickly. And, Brian, we inherited this affordability mess. It was the worst inflation in 40 to 50 years, one of the worst in history.” country. And accessibility consists of two components: price level and income level.”
He continued, “And what happened under Biden was cumulative inflation, reported inflation, the consumer price index was 2023% of what happened to working Americans. Their basket of goods and services, food, insurance, auto payments went up in the 30s, so they felt a real giant difference there. And what we're going to do is bring back high-paying manufacturing jobs, President Trump is going to do what he did in his first term, namely, to ensure that hourly workers and working Americans have real wages increased.”
Bessent added: “Brian, imagine two lines. There's the inflation line, we've got it under control. It's leveled off. It's going to start coming down. Then there's the income line, which under Biden, because there are so many jobs or government jobs, you can't get real wage growth in government jobs. Real wages are going to increase. And I expect that in the first quarter, the second quarter of next year, those two lines are going to cross, and the American people are going to start feeling better. But listen, it's been a tough one.” period.”
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