Biden concludes State of the Union Address: Full coverage and analysis

President Joe Biden said that “food inflation is coming down, not fast enough, but coming down. Inflation has fallen every month for the last six months, while take-home pay has gone up.” 

Facts first: Biden’s claims are true if he was comparing year-over-year growth rates to each other, but not if he was measuring inflation itself.

Food prices were up 10.4% in December 2022 from the year-before period, according to the latest available Consumer Price Index (CPI) report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Food price inflation, as measured by the CPI, has slowly declined since hitting a 40-year high of 11.4% in August 2022.  

Overall inflation, as measured by the CPI, was 6.5% in December 2022. The headline inflation rate has declined for six consecutive months since hitting a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022.  

The CPI, which measures the average change in the prices over time of a basket of consumer goods, is one of several closely watched inflation barometers that also have showed price increases to have moderated in recent months. Within CPI and other indexes, there are various measures to gauge inflation. Most notably, “core” inflation measures that exclude items with more volatile price increases.  

Biden’s claim that take-home pay has gone up is true if you start the calculation seven months ago; “real” wages, which take inflation into account, started rising in mid-2022 as inflation slowed.

However, real wages are lower today than they were both a full year ago and at the beginning of Biden’s presidency in Jan. 2021. That’s because inflation was so high in 2021 and the beginning of 2022.  

There are various ways to measure real wages. Real average hourly earnings declined 1.7% between December 2021 and December 2022, while real average weekly earnings (which factors in the number of hours people worked) declined 3.1% over that period.