Democrats have spent months trying to build a midterm campaign around one word: “affordability.” The pitch is that working families are falling further behind every month under President Trump. There is just one problem. The government’s own numbers say the opposite.
Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show the average private-sector paycheck has grown faster than prices since Trump took office, Breitbart News reports, and the gains have picked up speed in recent months. That is the reverse of what happened in the four years before he took office.
The math is simple. From January 2025, the month Trump was inaugurated, through August 2026, average weekly earnings for all private-sector employees rose from $1,222.14 to $1,298.94, a gain of 6.3 percent. Over the same 19 months, the Consumer Price Index rose 4.8 percent. Adjusted for inflation, the weekly paycheck is up 1.5 percent, about $18 a week in January 2025 dollars.
The latest stretch is even better. From May to August, the average weekly paycheck climbed from $1,285.91 to $1,298.94, up 1.0 percent, while prices were “essentially unchanged,” rising just 0.05 percent. That is a real raise of about $12 a week in three months.
Now compare that with the four years Democrats would rather voters forget. From January 2021 to January 2025, average weekly earnings rose 16.7 percent, from $1,047.55 to $1,222.14. Prices rose 21.4 percent. Real weekly pay fell 3.9 percent. In January 2025 dollars, the paycheck went from about $1,272 when Joe Biden took office to $1,222 when he left, “a loss of about $50 a week.”
That is the affordability record Democrats are running from. Families who watched their raises vanish at the grocery store under Biden didn’t imagine it. They were losing about $50 a week.
The turnaround isn’t limited to managers and high earners. Production and nonsupervisory workers, about four-fifths of private payrolls, saw real weekly pay fall 1.6 percent from January 2021 to January 2025. From January 2025 through August 2026, their real weekly pay is up 1.5 percent.
Nobody is claiming the damage from the Biden inflation years has been fully repaired. But the direction has flipped. Paychecks are now outrunning prices instead of losing to them, and the most recent months are the strongest yet.
The next test comes October 14, when the September Consumer Price Index is scheduled for release. For now, August is the latest month with both earnings and price data, and it tells a story the Democrats’ midterm ads won’t.
So the next time a Democrat on cable news says Trump has made life unaffordable, ask a simple question: If things are so bad, why did real paychecks shrink by about $50 a week on Biden’s watch, and why are they growing now?
Source: breitbart.com
