American television networks spent all morning covering the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, and if Her Majesty was just a figurehead, who reigned but not ruled, she still seems to have been more self-aware than President Biden:

REPORTER: “People are shocked by their grocery bills. What can you do better and faster?”

BIDEN: “Inflation rate month-to-month was up just an inch, hardly at all.”

pic.twitter.com/etyArH6YlG

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) September 19, 2022

The President tried to soft-peddle it, saying that, month-to-month, it was up “just an inch, hardly at all.” That would be great . . . if inflation hadn’t already been high. From The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. Inflation Remained High in August

Consumer prices excluding food, energy rose sharply, showing broad price pressures strengthened

By Gwynn Guilford | Updated September 13, 2022 | 7:17 PM EDT

U.S. consumer prices overall rose more slowly in August from a year earlier, but increased sharply from the prior month after excluding volatile food and energy prices, showing that inflation pressures remained strong and stubborn.

The Labor Department on Tuesday reported its consumer-price index rose 8.3% in August from the same month a year ago, down from 8.5% in July and from 9.1% in June, which was the highest inflation rate in four decades. The CPI measures what consumers pay for goods and services.

Here’s where the Journal’s paywall hits, but really, everyone who cares about economics should go ahead and subscribe to it!

And I guess that President Biden doesn’t read the Journal either, because in the 60 Minutes clip, because he didn’t know July’s inflation rate, either, saying:

It was 8.2, 8.2 before.

Clearly his supervisors hadn’t clued him in.

A President in command of the facts would have both expected the question about inflation, and would have said that yes, 8.3% is too high, but at least the inflation rate had dropped a bit.

Back to the Journal:

So-called core CPI, which excludes energy and food prices, increased 6.3% in August from a year earlier, up markedly from the 5.9% rate in both June and July—a signal that broad price pressures strengthened.

On a monthly basis, the core CPI rose 0.6% in August—double July’s pace. Investors and policy makers follow core inflation closely as a reflection of broad, underlying inflation and as a predictor of future inflation.

Let’s, as the President said, “put this in perspective”: the August 2022 inflation rate of 8.3% is on top of the August 2021 inflation rate of 5.3%

Skipping further down, we come to this stark paragraph:

The average household is spending $460 more each month to buy the same basket of goods and services as last year, said Ryan Sweet, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics.

Assuming 22 workdays a month, and a loss of 20% to taxes and insurance withheld, that “average household” would need a wage increase of $3.136 per hour just to break even. Do you think that happened?

Real average hourly earnings decreased 2.8 percent, seasonally adjusted, from August 2021 to August 2022. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with a decrease of 0.6 percent in the average workweek resulted in a 3.4-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period.

That’s for all workers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics — same source — also broke it down for “Production and Non-supervisory Workers”:

From August 2021 to August 2022, real average hourly earnings decreased 2.4 percent, seasonally adjusted. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with a 0.9-percent decrease in the average workweek resulted in a 3.2-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period.

It’s kind of amusing: the supervisors and managers saw a greater loss of real earnings, but the working-class people, the ones who feel the economic pinch more because they earn less, still lost 3.2% in real terms.

Inflation is a serious, serious problem, and it is making the American people poorer in real terms. Perhaps President Biden doesn’t realize it, now that he’s got the government paying for his seemingly every weekend trips to Rehoboth Beach, but the surge in inflation, which began almost as soon as he took office, has made life worse for the public. But hey, at least there are no mean tweets!