American workers in the last 18 months have lost $3,400 in annual wages due to President Joe Biden’s 40-year-high inflation, according to an expert at the Heritage Foundation.

E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox Business that a family with two working parents has lost $6,800 in annual wages.

“I can’t emphasize enough how much this is really crushing consumers,” Antoni said about his estimate.

“It’s [inflation] truly crushing the middle class and then the White House spokesperson says these garbage lines like ‘the economy is in transition,’” he told the publication. “Transition in the same sense, I suppose, that an iceberg transitioned the Titanic into a submarine.”

The White House has claimed inflation will help consumers transition to a more expensive renewable energy because the cost of fossil fuel is a large contributor to Biden’s inflation.

On Wednesday, inflation rose to an annual rate of 9.1 percent in June, according to the Department of Labor. This is the highest rate since 1981. When Biden assumed office, inflation was 1.4 percent. Breitbart News reported:

Compared with a month earlier, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index was up 1.3 percent.

Economists had expected CPI to rise at an annual rate of 8.8 percent, up from 8.6 percent in May. They expected a month-over-month increase of 1.1 percent.

Inflation has American families hard by raising prices for everyday necessities like food, gasoline, housing, transportation, and utilities. Huge increases in the price of gasoline in June, which hit new all-time highs several times during the month, started to sap household and business spending on other items.

According to a Moody’s June analysis, Biden’s 40-year-high inflation will cost American households on average an extra $5,520 in 2022, or $460 per month. In March, that projection was less. Bloomberg estimated families would be charged an extra $5,200 in 2022, or $433 per month.

Polling shows 74 percent of respondents said Biden’s soaring gas prices are an “extremely/very important” factor in how they will vote in the midterm elections. Biden’s approval on his management of gas prices is only 27 percent.

Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter and Gettr @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.