Fourth-of-July Inflation Fireworks
I’m going to keep things short and sweet today, going into the Fourth of July weekend. The one story I wanted to comment on is a government report that congress puts out this time of year about how much the cost of a Fourth of July barbecue has changed. Holy barbecue smoke! Based on the report, you can put anything you’ve seen written on paper that claimed tariffs won’t cause inflation in your barbecue and use it to light the fire.
According to the report, the price of putting on your barbecue dinner SKYROCKETED from just the start of April to the end of June by a whopping 13% annualized (i.e, if inflation continues at that level until May 31st of next year)!
Now, there is one little caveat, and that is that the source of the information is from Trump’s enemies, the Democrats; but here are some of the particulars:
The total cost of a typical grocery trip for a cookout has increased by a 12.7% annualized rate since President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff announcement in April, according to the analysis by the Joint Economic Committee’s Democratic minority arm. It calculated the price increase using consumer price index data for the most popular food and beverage items for a 10-person summer cookout.
The minority analysis found that a six-pack of bottled lite domestic beer from Miller Lite and Coors Light increased by more than 13% each since the April tariff announcement. The analysis looked at Walmart to find the most popular products and tracked their prices from April 1 to June 26 using price checking website AisleGopher.
Now, IF they did what they said, simply taking their prices from Walmart, where I pointed out yesterday the CEO had a month or two ago warned us Walmart would definitely be making price increases due to the high levels of tariffs, then those should be solid numbers. So long as the Dem’s are not outright lying, it’s hard to fudge Walmart’s costs back on April 1 compared to Walmart’s cost on the same items on July 1.
Still, read closely: that’s domestic beer that went up that much. So, tariffs shouldn’t affect that, right? Yet, the article says this is due to tariffs.
For imported beers, the minority analysis found a 10.5% price increase for bottles of Peroni Nastro Azzurro and a 9.5% increase for Modelo Especial bottles.
In April, Trump announced 25% tariffs on beer imports and empty aluminum cans. In early June, his administration hiked tariffs on imported aluminum to 50%….
Since April 1, Amazon listings for a Coleman foldable camping chair increased 47.7% and a 25-piece griddle accessories kit increased 17.7%, according to the report.
Other products saw more modest increases. A Banana Boat sunscreen rose 8.1%, Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil rose 6.9%, a Weber propane grill increased 5% and a multi-pack of disposable plates and utensils rose 3.3%, the report said.
One article back in April, when this inflation seems to have shot upward warned that domestic beer was expected to rise due to the very high tariffs on aluminum:
While there are plenty of brews made on U.S. soil from ingredients grown and harvested here, the tariffs will affect these products anyway because the tariffs affect aluminum.
While the aluminum in the cans of imported beer is not likely impacted by tariffs coming across the border, as it would simply be tariffed along with the beer inside as “beer,” it seems unlikely that the higher cost of aluminum cans made in the US could cause the price of beer to rise so much.
In fact, the White House said awhile back,
all canned beer imports and empty aluminum cans will be subject to a 25% tariff, not just those imported from Canada and Mexico.
It was estimated back then that the aluminum tariff would add $1-2 to the price of a six-pack of domestic beer. However, canned beer would be tariffed as a single product, not as so much for the aluminum can and so much for the beer.
Still, the aluminum thing seems like a red herring. Take another closer look, if you need to, since both articles seem to be blaming aluminum: the prices quoted for both domestic beer and imported beer in the Democratic report were for bottled beer. Aluminum had nothing to do with it! So, there almost has to be something wrong with the Democrat’s report. Maybe it is just the fact that it was made by Democrats. I’ve looked, but I cannot find a way to make their numbers make sense. Nor could I find a contrasting report put out by the majority side of the committee, and you’d think if the Dem’s were wrong, they’d call them out on it.
So, looking eslewhere,
A separate May report from Rabobank, a global food and agribusiness bank, found that the cost of a 10-person barbeque rose 4.2% this year and will hit $100 for the first time ever. Its barbeque index highlighted higher beef prices as a contributing factor.
That is still a rise in inflation, but not nearly as bad as the report put out by the enemies of Trump. Perhaps they should justify their numbers and explain why domestic beer went up so much more than imported beer and why they are talking about aluminum costs in this report when they are reporting on beer in glass bottles? Seems like some sleight of hand.
Did domestic brewers raise their prices just because they could when all the tariffed foreign beer went up? That can happen; but it seems unlikely domestic breweries would raise their prices even more than their foreign competition just to price gouge, so I doubt it. It is not that I think they would never price gouge, but I think they would be more inclined to capture some windfall from the tariffs with a smaller price gain than tariffs forced on their competition and use the rest of the tariff difference to capture market share from the foreign market at the same time. The idea that they would raise their prices more than their foreign competition because of the tariffs makes little sense.
Brewers in Toledo warned back in June they would be raising prices because their cost of labor and of ingredients had risen. Still, I would expect they buy most of their agricultural ingredients domestically.
I notice The Hill, a liberal publication, quotes the Democrats report as if it is a fact that the inflation came from tariffs without questioning, at all, how it is that import tariffs would impact the price of domestic beer more than the price of imported beer. Seems like a fairly obvious question to me. They let it get a free pass.
I did a bit of research today to try to find the answer and could not. Maybe the Dem’s report is just rubbish, yet is being quoted by The Hill and CNBC as a fact without questioning the obvious. Unfortunately, the best I can do is suggest, just for interest sake, you note what you spend on your Fourth of July BBQ and see how much more expensive it seems to you to be than those items would have been back in March and whether the items were likely tariffed imports or were likely domestic, and let us know in the comments below.
Have a happy Independence Day! And thank you to those who support this site.
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