During an interview with Bloomberg on Friday, acting Labor Secretary Julie Su claimed that “prices are lower than they were a year ago, and significantly so.” And that gas prices “continue to come down.”
Host Joe Mathieu asked, “Well, so you’re clearly up on the state of the job market right now, and workers, I suspect, are too. Lower unemployment, rising wages, but those — again, those two trends come together in an inflationary way. How do you balance those two moving forward?”
Su responded, “So, at the same time, we are seeing the inflation rate come down, right? It is — it was like 3% last month. We’ll see more numbers in a week. But prices are lower than they were a year ago, and significantly so. A year ago, remember, we were talking about gas prices, we were talking about the price of eggs, all of those things continue to come down. And I think people are feeling them at the grocery store. They’re also feeling them, because, when real wages grow, especially for low and middle-income individuals, you see it, and we’re seeing it in consumer spending. We’re seeing it in confidence. It’s all reflected as I travel around the country in the sense of confidence that people are feeling. That’s all part of the broader recovery.”
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