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    Gloomy about the economy and inflation, Americans remain upbeat about jobs.

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    Americans are worried about inflation, pessimistic about the economy overall and upset about the way their leaders are handling it. But they still feel pretty good about the job market.Fifty-two percent of Americans say it is a good time to find a job right now, compared with just 11 percent who say it is a bad time, according to a survey conducted last month for The New York Times by the online research firm Momentive. (The rest say the situation is “mixed,” or didn’t answer the question.) Fifty-six percent say the job market is more favorable to employees than employers, and a majority think that these conditions will continue for at least six months.Most Americans are not worried, either, that their jobs are in jeopardy. Forty-four percent of those surveyed said they were concerned that they or a member of their household would be laid off in the next few months, up only modestly from 37 percent just before the pandemic.“People see the job market as still a little bit of a bright spot,” said Brianna Richardson, a research scientist for Momentive.The rosy outlook on jobs is a striking contrast to Americans’ views of the economy writ large. More than 90 percent of people in the survey said they were concerned about inflation, and a majority said they were worse off financially than a year earlier. Only 17 percent said overall business conditions in the country were somewhat or very good.Ms. Richardson said the results suggested that bad news on inflation was eclipsing good news on jobs in Americans’ perceptions of the economy. That appears to be true for people’s own finances as well: Even though they see it as an employee-friendly job market, most workers say they haven’t gotten raises that keep up with rising prices.Americans take a dim view of the way the White House and the Federal Reserve have handled inflation, although the survey was conducted before Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia signed on to a bill that Democrats say would help reduce inflation. But those polled don’t necessarily think Republicans would do better. Forty-four percent of respondents said they thought Democrats would do a better job with the economy, versus 47 percent who preferred Republicans on the issue. Those numbers were little changed from the last time the question was asked, in May 2019.About the survey: The data in this article came from an online survey of 5,881 adults conducted by the polling firm Momentive from July 18 to July 25. The company selected respondents at random from the more than two million people who take surveys on its platform each day. Responses were weighted to match the demographic profile of the population of the United States. The survey has a modeled error estimate (similar to a margin of error in a standard telephone poll) of plus or minus two percentage points, so differences of less than that amount are statistically insignificant. More

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    Analysis Deems Biden’s Climate and Tax Bill Fiscally Responsible

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    Despite Republican claims, the new legislation would be only a modest corporate tax increase, Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation found.After more than a year of trying — and failing — to pack much of President Biden’s domestic agenda into a single tax-and-spend bill, Democrats appear to have finally found a winning combination. They’ve scrapped most of the president’s plans, dialed down the cost and focused on climate change, health care and a lower budget deficit.As soon as party leaders announced that new bill last week, Republicans began attacking it in familiar terms. They called it a giant tax increase and a foolish expansion of government spending, which they alleged would hurt an economy reeling from rapid inflation.But outside estimates suggest the bill would not cement a giant tax increase or result in profligate federal spending.An analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a congressional nonpartisan scorekeeper for tax legislation, suggests that the bill would raise about $70 billion over 10 years. But the increase would be front-loaded: By 2027, the bill would actually amount to a net tax cut each year, as new credits and other incentives for low-emission energy sources outweighed a new minimum tax on some large corporations.That analysis, along with a broader estimate of the bill’s provisions from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, suggests that the legislation, if passed, would only modestly add to federal spending over the next 10 years. By the end of the decade, the bill would be reducing federal spending, compared with what is scheduled to happen if it does not become law.And because the bill also includes measures to empower the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on corporations and high-earning individuals who evade taxes, it is projected to reduce the federal budget deficit over a decade by about $300 billion.Adding up the headline cost for what Democrats are calling the Inflation Reduction Act is more complicated than it was for many previous tax or spending measures that lawmakers approved. The bill blends tax increases and tax credits, just as Republicans did when they passed President Donald J. Trump’s signature tax package in 2017. But it also includes a spending increase meant to boost tax revenues and a spending cut meant to put more money in consumers’ pockets.Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said the composition of the deal was vastly different from a larger bill that Democrats failed to push through the Senate in the fall. It included several spending programs that were set to expire after a few years, and budget hawks warned that the overall package would add heavily to federal debt if those programs were eventually made permanent, as Washington has been known to do, without offsetting tax increases.Ms. MacGuineas called the original idea, known as Build Back Better, “a massive gimmicky budget buster.” She had kinder words for the new package, saying it “manages to push against inflation, reduce the deficit, and, once fully phased in, it would actually cut net spending, without raising net taxes.”“That is a pretty monumental improvement,” she added.The bill springs from an agreement between Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, and Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a key centrist Democrat. President Biden blessed it last week, and it carries what remains of what was once his $4 trillion domestic agenda.Understand What Happened to Biden’s Domestic AgendaCard 1 of 7‘Build Back Better.’ More

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    Biden’s New Economic Scorecard: The Price at the Pump

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    The president has grown fond of boasting about a prolonged streak of falling gasoline prices, a move wrapped in risk and irony.WASHINGTON — After topping $5 a gallon in June, the price of gasoline has fallen for more than a month. The Biden administration wants to tell you about it. Again and again.President Biden and his top aides are in an all-out campaign to trumpet what is, as of Friday, 38 consecutive days of declines in the AAA average gas price nationwide. The president mentioned that streak in a news conference in Saudi Arabia and at the start of a speech on abortion rights. Aides have repeatedly trotted out charts showing the downward trajectory in news briefings and chastised reporters for not devoting more time to the subject.When President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico needled Mr. Biden in a meeting at the White House this month, saying that Americans were crossing the border to buy cheaper gas, the president interrupted him.“It has gone down for 30 days in a row,” Mr. Biden said.Celebrating the daily declines at the pump has become his version of President Donald J. Trump’s rampant bragging about gains in the stock market: a public obsession with a single economic indicator in hopes of driving a winning narrative with consumers and voters.Embracing this particular trend comes with obvious risks for Mr. Biden. Gas prices notoriously bounce up and down, and events outside his control could easily push them up again. If the administration’s efforts to impose a global price cap on Russian oil exports falls through before year’s end, White House economists fear that prices could soar higher than they were this spring, to potentially $7 per gallon.Gasoline cheerleading also poses an ironic challenge to Mr. Biden’s efforts to confront the mounting crisis of a warming planet.The jump in prices has had the short-term effect of forcing budget-constrained Americans to drive less, temporarily reducing the consumption of fossil fuels that drive global warming. But White House aides say the high prices are not helping Mr. Biden’s efforts to move the country to a low-emissions future. Instead, those costs might be undermining his longer-term climate goals by bolstering political and public support for more oil drilling and other fossil-fuel projects.High prices for motorists have already soured voters on the president’s handling of the economy and his overall performance in office. Mr. Biden, who speaks frequently of growing up in a working-class family where “if the price of gas went up, you felt it,” has for months tried to reassure voters that he is doing whatever he can to bring those prices down.When gasoline climbed past $3 a gallon nationwide in the fall, as global demand for oil increased amid the rebound of economic activity from the pandemic, Mr. Biden opened the taps of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In the spring, when prices reached $4 a gallon, he announced a waiver allowing summer sales of higher-ethanol gasoline, which costs slightly less for drivers but emits more greenhouse gases over its life cycle.When prices peaked above $5 a gallon this summer amid the war in Ukraine, Mr. Biden called for a suspension of the federal gas tax (which Congress has not passed), implored oil-producing countries in the Middle East to pump more crude into global markets and accused large oil companies and refiners of profiteering.Motorists in Brooklyn last week. Gas prices peaked above $5 a gallon this summer.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAnalysts say the president’s efforts may have helped hold down prices at the margins. But no economists give the administration even a majority of credit for the steep drop in global oil prices that began in early June. Instead, they point to market forces: reduced oil demand from China, which is enduring another wave of restrictions because of the coronavirus, and weakening economic activity in Europe and other wealthy nations. Russian oil has also continued to flow to world markets despite sanctions imposed by the United States and other Western nations.The average national price reported by AAA on Friday was $4.41 per gallon. The drop over the past month is likely to produce a more favorable inflation rate for July than the 9.1 percent annual increase of the Consumer Price Index that the Labor Department reported for June. Industry analysts and futures markets suggest more relief is likely to be expected in the coming weeks.Mr. Biden has embraced the change. On Friday, in his first virtual event since testing positive for the coronavirus the day before, the president convened a half-dozen economic advisers for a briefing on falling gas prices.“You can find gas for $3.99 or less in more than 30,000 gas stations, in more than 35 states,” he said. “In some places, it’s down almost a dollar from last month.”While administration officials sought to deflect blame for rising oil prices over the past year, they were happy to claim at least partial credit for the current decline.“While there’s a lot that goes into setting the global oil and gas price,” Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in a news briefing on Monday, “the historic actions taken by President Biden to address the impact of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have helped and continue to help to increase the global supply of oil and therefore are in the mix of factors driving down the price.”Republicans say they are surprised the administration is celebrating at all, when prices remain more than $2 a gallon higher than they were when Mr. Biden took office. (They do not mention that he inherited an economy where global demand for oil was suppressed by the coronavirus pandemic.)It might also seem counterintuitive that the president is encouraging lower gasoline costs while he pursues what aides promise will be an ambitious unilateral agenda to cut greenhouse gas emissions.“The real answer,” Mr. Biden said on Friday, “is to get to a clean-energy economy as soon as possible, turn this into something positive.”Economists largely agree that raising the prices of fossil fuels like coal and gasoline is a way to ensure that consumers burn less of them and to encourage switching to lower-emission alternatives like electric vehicles. The Energy Department reported on Wednesday that gasoline use in the United States was down nearly 8 percent over the past four weeks compared with the same period a year ago. That continued for the second quarter of the year, which the Energy Information Administration said might have been the result of rising gasoline prices.But Biden administration officials — even economists who have previously favored steps to raise taxes on fossil fuels — say the high prices are not helping the president’s climate agenda.The prices are reinvigorating a push by Republicans for increased oil and gas drilling on federal lands, which Mr. Biden promised to end while campaigning for president. Recent price volatility could also give customers pause when they consider buying a more efficient gas-powered vehicle, or an electric one, when supply-chain shortages in the automobile industry are making it harder for consumers to buy electric cars anyway.Aides to Mr. Biden have privately said for months that to keep Americans on board with the energy transition, gas prices need to come down — definitely below $4 a gallon, and hopefully below $3, which was the national average at the start of last summer.If prices continue to decline at the rate they have over the past month, the nationwide average would slip below $3 a gallon in the final weeks of campaigning before the midterm elections. In about 79 days, to be exact.Not that anyone’s counting. More

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    America’s Safety Net for Workers Hurt by Globalization Is Falling Apart

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    A 60-year-old program that provides retraining to workers whose jobs are eliminated because of foreign competition has expired, leaving many at risk.WASHINGTON — In September, the lighting factory in Logan, Ohio, where Jeff Ogg has clocked in nearly every day for the last 37 years, will shut its doors, driven out of business by a shift from fluorescent lighting toward LED technology that is often made cheaply in China.At 57, Mr. Ogg is not yet ready to retire. But when he applied to a national retraining program that helps workers who have lost their jobs to foreign competition, he was dismayed to see his application rejected. A follow-up request for reconsideration was immediately denied.The program that Mr. Ogg looked to for help, known as Trade Adjustment Assistance, has for the past 60 years been America’s main antidote to the pressures that globalization has unleashed on its workers. More than five million workers have participated in the program.But a lack of congressional funding has put the program in jeopardy: Trade assistance was officially terminated on July 1, though it continues to temporarily serve current enrollees. Unless Congress approves new money for the $700 million program, it will cease to exist entirely.Established in 1962, trade assistance was intended to help workers whose factory and other jobs were increasingly moving overseas as companies chased cheap labor outside the United States. It provides services like subsidies for retraining, job search assistance, health coverage tax credits and allowances for relocation.But the benefits have been gradually scaled back given a lack of funding, including limiting who qualifies for assistance. A year ago, the program was restricted to workers who make goods, even though jobs in services have also undergone a wave of offshoring as companies set up call centers and accounting departments overseas. In addition, only those whose jobs shifted to countries that have a free-trade agreement with the United States — like Canada and Mexico, but not China — were eligible for assistance.On July 1, the program stopped reviewing new applications and appeals from workers whose applications have been rejected, and it will be phased out.While often criticized as inefficient and bureaucratic, the program has been the country’s primary answer to trade competition for decades. Its disappearance may leave thousands of workers without critical support as they seek new jobs. In 2021, the Department of Labor certified 801 petitions for trade adjustment assistance from various workplaces, covering an estimated 107,454 American workers.The decision over whether to reauthorize the program has become a casualty of an intense fight in Congress over what to include in a sprawling bill aimed at making America more competitive with China. The centerpiece of the legislation is $52 billion in funding for semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, but lawmakers have been clashing over whether to include other provisions related to trade, such as funding for worker retraining.House Democrats had proposed including other trade provisions as well, including measures to increase scrutiny on investments that might send American technology overseas and eliminate tariff exemptions for small-value goods imported from China.The State of Jobs in the United StatesJob gains continue to maintain their impressive run, easing worries of an economic slowdown but complicating efforts to fight inflation.June Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 372,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remained steady at 3.6 percent ​​in the sixth month of 2022.Care Worker Shortages: A lack of child care and elder care options is forcing some women to limit their hours or has sidelined them altogether, hurting their career prospects.Downsides of a Hot Market: Students are forgoing degrees in favor of the attractive positions offered by employers desperate to hire. That could come back to haunt them.Slowing Down: Economists and policymakers are beginning to argue that what the economy needs right now is less hiring and less wage growth. Here’s why.On Tuesday, the Senate voted to advance a smaller legislative package that includes funding for the chips industry and broader research and development, but lacks funding for Trade Adjustment Assistance or other trade-related measures. The chips legislation will still require further approval in both the House and Senate.Supporters of Trade Adjustment Assistance say that they will not stop pushing for its reauthorization, and that funding for the program could still be included in other legislation.Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat from Ohio, blamed Republican lawmakers for “holding T.A.A. hostage” and said he would continue fighting to reauthorize the program.“They have sold out American manufacturing over and over by voting for trade deals and tax policy that send jobs overseas, and continue to block investments to empower workers who lose their jobs because of those bad trade deals,” Mr. Brown said in emailed remarks. “T.A.A. serves workers — like those in Logan, Ohio — who have their lives upended through no fault of their own.”The program and its benefits are already out of reach for Mr. Ogg and 50 others who work at the Logan plant, which manufactures the glass tubes in fluorescent lighting fixtures that were once ubiquitous in schools and offices. The plant tried to transition to making LED lights in recent years, but found those lights could be purchased more cheaply from abroad.“Our plant, our people, most of them have been there 25-plus years,” said Mr. Ogg, who is the president of the local United Steelworkers union. “You work in the same place that long, that’s all you know.”Mr. Ogg said he had no complaints about his career at the plant, where he estimates the average wage is between $25 and $30 an hour — enough for him to buy a home and raise three children. But he’s feeling unsure about what to do next. He previously worked as a mechanic, but said the type of machinery that he had worked on was no longer around.“A lot has changed,” Mr. Ogg added. “If you’ve been stuck in one place for 30-some years, you’re going to need some help to go to the next level.”Trade Adjustment Assistance was intended to do just that — help workers who need new skills to compete in a more globalized economy. The program offered income support to workers who lost their jobs and exhausted unemployment benefits while they retrained for other jobs. Those who are 50 and older and take on lower-paying jobs could qualify for a wage insurance program that temporarily boosted their take-home pay.Some academic research has found benefits for those who enrolled in the program. Workers gave up about $10,000 in income while training, but 10 years later they had about $50,000 higher cumulative earnings than those who did not retrain, according to research from 2018 by Benjamin G. Hyman, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.Still, those relative gains decayed over time, Mr. Hyman’s research shows. After 10 years the incomes of those who received assistance and those who did not were the same — perhaps because the jobs that workers in T.A.A. trained for had also become obsolete as a result of automation and trade competition. Yet Mr. Hyman concluded that earnings returns from the program “may be larger and more effective than previously thought.”The United Steelworkers Local 1999 in Indianapolis, which fought to save manufacturing jobs from companies like Rexnord, which moved its operations to Mexico in 2017.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesThe program fell victim to concerns over its expense and efficiency, as well as what was left out of the broader package of trade legislation. In the past, the funding for the program was coupled with something called Trade Promotion Authority, which streamlined the process for congressional approval of U.S. trade agreements.The combination of Trade Promotion Authority and Trade Adjustment Assistance was a political formula that worked for decades, said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Fore­­­ign Relations. Presidents promised businesses more access to foreign markets, and they made commitments to providing labor unions and their supporters with compensation if jobs were lost in the process.But American views on trade have turned more negative in recent years, as China began dominating global industries and as income inequality widened. Democrats have grown so disillusioned with the effects of global trade and split over its benefits that the Biden administration has declined to push for new pacts.Before writing any new trade deals, Mr. Biden said he would first focus on boosting American competitiveness, including by investing in infrastructure, clean energy, and research and development. And when Trade Promotion Authority expired last year, Biden administration officials did not lobby Congress to reauthorize it.Some Republicans are balking at reapproving trade adjustment assistance when the president shows little intention to open up new overseas business opportunities through trade agreements.“America’s on the sidelines right now on trade, and President Biden’s moratorium on new trade agreements seems firm,” Representative Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas, told reporters late last month. “There would have to be a much stronger ironclad commitment to resuming American leadership in trade to even begin this discussion on extending T.A.A.”“We’re open to creative ideas here, but if we don’t have a serious, significant trade agenda that opens up markets for American workers, T.A.A. doesn’t make much sense,” Mr. Brady added.Mr. Biden’s plans to boost American competitiveness have only been partly fulfilled. While Congress approved billions of dollars for new infrastructure investments, other aspects of the president’s domestic agenda, including funding for the energy transition, have crumbled. Lawmakers have struggled to amass the support even for legislation in favor of expanded funding for the semiconductor industry, which is widely seen as key to American industry and national security.With so many other legislative goals at stake, the termination of a decades-old solution to the economic trade-offs of free trade has garnered little attention.“The old consensus on trade is gone,” said Mr. Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations. “And we don’t have a new one.”Catie Edmondson More

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    How Joe Manchin Left a Global Tax Deal in Limbo

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    Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen’s signature achievement is in jeopardy if the United States cannot ratify the tax agreement that she brokered.WASHINGTON — In June, months after reluctantly signing on to a global tax agreement brokered by the United States, Ireland’s finance minister met privately with Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, seeking reassurances that the Biden administration would hold up its end of the deal.Ms. Yellen assured the minister, Paschal Donohoe, that the administration would be able to secure enough votes in Congress to ensure that the United States was in compliance with the pact, which was aimed at cracking down on companies evading taxes by shifting jobs and profits around the world.It turns out that Ms. Yellen was overly optimistic. Late last week, Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, effectively scuttled the Biden administration’s tax agenda in Congress — at least for now — by saying he could not immediately support a climate, energy and tax package he had spent months negotiating with the Democratic leadership. He expressed deep misgivings about the international tax deal, which he had previously indicated he could support, saying it would put American companies at a disadvantage.“I said we’re not going to go down that path overseas right now because the rest of the countries won’t follow, and we’ll put all of our international companies in jeopardy, which harms the American economy,” Mr. Manchin told a West Virginia radio station on Friday. “So we took that off the table.”Mr. Manchin’s reversal, couched in the language used by Republican opponents of the deal, is a blow to Ms. Yellen, who spent months getting more than 130 countries on board. It is also a defeat for President Biden and Democratic leaders in the Senate, who pushed hard to raise tax rates on many multinational corporations in hopes of leading the world in an effort to stop companies from shifting jobs and income to minimize their tax bills.The agreement would have ushered in the most sweeping changes to global taxation in decades, including raising taxes on many large corporations and changing how technology companies are taxed. The two-pronged approach would entail countries enacting a 15 percent minimum tax so that companies pay a rate of at least that much on their global profits no matter where they set up shop. It would also allow governments to tax the world’s largest and most profitable companies based on where their goods and services were sold, not where their headquarters were.Failure to get agreement at home creates a mess both for the Biden administration and for multinational corporations. Many other countries are likely to press ahead to ratify the deal, but some may now be emboldened to hold out, fracturing the coalition and potentially opening the door for some countries to continue marketing themselves as corporate tax havens.For now, the situation will allow for the continued aggressive use of global tax avoidance strategies by companies like the pharmaceutical giant AbbVie. A Senate Finance Committee report this month found that the company made three-quarters of its sales to American customers in 2020, yet reported only 1 percent of its income in the United States for tax purposes — a move that allowed it to slash its effective tax rate to about half of the 21 percent American corporate income tax rate.Not changing international tax laws could also sow new uncertainty for large tech companies, like Google and Amazon, and other businesses that earn money from consumers in countries where they do not have many employees or physical offices. Part of the global agreement was meant to give those companies more certainty on which countries could tax them, and how much they would have to pay.America’s refusal to take part would be a significant setback for Ms. Yellen, whose role in getting the deal done was viewed as her signature diplomatic achievement. For months last year, she lobbied nations around the world, from Ireland to India, on the merits of the tax agreement, only to see her own political party decline to heed her calls to get on board.Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe of Ireland met in Washington last month.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressAfter Mr. Manchin’s comments, the Treasury Department said it was not giving up on the agreement.“The United States remains committed to finalizing a global minimum tax,” Michael Kikukawa, a Treasury spokesman, said in a statement. “It’s too important for our economic strength and competitiveness to not finalize this agreement, and we’ll continue to look at every avenue possible to get it done.”Jared Bernstein, a member of Mr. Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters at the White House on Monday that Mr. Biden “remains fully committed” to participating in a global tax agreement.Understand What Happened to Biden’s Domestic AgendaCard 1 of 6‘Build Back Better.’ More

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    Voters See a Bad Economy, Even if They’re Doing OK

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    A New York Times/Siena poll shows remarkable pessimism despite the labor market’s resilience. That could be costly for the Democrats, and the economy.The fastest inflation in four decades has Americans feeling dour about the economy, even as their own finances have, so far, held up relatively well.Just 10 percent of registered voters say the U.S. economy is “good” or “excellent,” according to a New York Times/Siena College poll — a remarkable degree of pessimism at a time when wages are rising and the unemployment rate is near a 50-year low. But the rapidly rising cost of food, gas and other essentials is wiping out pay increases and eroding living standards.Americans’ grim outlook is bad news for President Biden and congressional Democrats heading into this fall’s midterm elections, given that 78 percent of voters say inflation will be “extremely important” when they head to the polls.

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    Thinking about the nation’s economy, how would you rate economic conditions today?
    Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of 849 registered voters from July 5 to 7.By The New York TimesIt could be bad news for the economy as well. One long-running index of consumer sentiment hit a record low in June, and other surveys likewise show Americans becoming increasingly nervous about both their own finances and the broader economy.Economists have long studied the role of consumer sentiment, which can be driven by media narratives and indicators unrepresentative of the broader economy, like certain grocery prices or shortages of particular goods. At least in theory, economic pessimism can become self-fulfilling, as consumers pull back their spending, leading to layoffs and, ultimately, to a recession.Christina Simmons grew up poor and has worked hard to give her 7-year-old son a better life. She has climbed the ranks at the health insurer where she works near Jacksonville, Fla., and has more than doubled her salary over the past few years. Yet she feels as if she is falling behind.“I worked my butt off to get to where I’m at so I could take vacations with my son,” she said. “We would take off for the weekend and get a hotel room in another state, and go do a hike and see a waterfall and order a pizza in a hotel room and all of that. And I just can’t do that anymore.”Ms. Simmons, 30, is still able to make ends meet, partly because she is able to save money on gas by working remotely. But she is worried about what could happen if the economy slows and puts her job in jeopardy — one consequence of being promoted, she said, is that she is farther from customers, making her more vulnerable to layoffs. She has cut out modest luxuries, like a gym membership and nights out with friends, to build up her savings.“I’m saving the money just in case it gets even worse,” she said. “I’m being more strict than I have to because I don’t know how it’s going to go.”Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

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    Democrats Face Deepening Peril as Republicans Seize on Inflation Fears

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    Economists warn that a blitz of midterm election campaign ads could push consumer prices even higher.WASHINGTON — Triple-digit gasoline bills. Bulging hamburger prices. A Fourth of July holiday that broke the bank.Prices are rising at the fastest rate in four decades, a painful development that has given Republicans a powerful talking point just months ahead of the midterm elections. With control of Congress very much in play, Republicans are investing heavily in a blitz of campaign advertisements that portray a dark sense of economic disarray as they seek to make inflation a political albatross for President Biden and Democrats.According to Kantar’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, candidates running in House, Senate and governor races around the country have spent nearly $22 million airing about 130,000 local and national television ads that mention inflation from early April through the beginning of July. Inflation was the 10th most common issue mentioned by Democrats and 11th most common for Republicans, according to the data, underscoring how critical the issue is to both parties this election cycle.The data released Wednesday showing that prices in June climbed 9.1 percent over the past year gave Republicans fresh ammunition against Mr. Biden and his party, ammunition that includes faulting Democrats for passing a $1.9 trillion stimulus package last year and efforts to push through additional spending in a sweeping climate and economic package known as “Build Back Better.”The intensifying focus on inflation is already weighing on Mr. Biden’s poll numbers. A New York Times/Siena College poll this week showed his approval at a meager 33 percent, with 20 percent of voters viewing jobs and the economy as the most important problem facing the country. Inflation and the cost of living followed closely behind. The poll also showed that the race for control of Congress is surprisingly tight.While gas prices have fallen from their $5 a gallon peak and there are signs that inflation might be slowing, consumers are unlikely to feel better off anytime soon. Gas prices are still much higher than they were a year ago, with the average national price for a gallon at $4.60 versus $3.15 in 2021, according to AAA.Voters view jobs and the economy as among the most important issues facing the country.Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times“It’s a very negative thing politically for the Democrats,” said Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University and former Obama administration economic adviser. “My guess is that the negative views about inflation are so deeply baked in that nothing can change in the next few months to change them.”The White House, while acknowledging the pain that inflation is causing, has tried to deflect responsibility, saying that it is a global problem and attributing it to shortages of food and oil stemming from Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.On Wednesday, Mr. Biden called the latest Consumer Price Index “out-of-date” given the recent fall in gas prices and said the data “is a reminder that all major economies are battling this Covid-related challenge, made worse by Putin’s unconscionable aggression.”8 Signs That the Economy Is Losing SteamCard 1 of 9Worrying outlook. More