The everyday prices Americans pay for rent, food and gasoline have added pressure to wallets compared to one year ago – but it hits seniors especially hard, according to one Republican senator.
“What people and seniors who look at their accounts probably daily, many of them, they know that when they go to the grocery store and want to get groceries, they’ve got to pay $120 for what they were paying $100 for just last year,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said on “Mornings with Maria,” Tuesday.
“And that’s worrisome to those that are retiring. They know that they have only a certain amount to be able to retire. They’ve planned well,” she continued, “but the effect of their dollar is much less.”
September’s consumer price index (CPI) from the U.S. Labor Department indicated that inflation rose above economists’ expectations, up 0.2% from the prior month and 2.4% from one year ago.
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More recently, the Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni released a study showing that the Biden-Harris administration’s economic policies have had a detrimental impact on senior citizens’ retirement plans.
The report found that the average 401(k) plan grew by $11,000 from 2021 to 2024, but when adjusted for inflation, it represents a $12,000 (9.2%) loss.
“We keep saying: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? And we know the answer. The answer is no,” the senator said. “Seniors, it hits particularly hard when they look at their retirement accounts.”
In a recent post on X, Sen. Moore Capito claimed inflation is costing the average West Virginian household an extra $900 per month.
“Their rent’s up, their energy costs are up,” she pointed out to FOX Business host Maria Bartiromo. “And if you look at what President Trump’s policies are, absolutely during those years when he was our president, everybody’s wages were going up, inflation was down.”
Vice President Kamala Harris’ plans for small business tax deductions and cracking down on billionaires are just used as “talking points,” the senator further criticized. On Harris’ campaign website, she’s proposed “enacting a billionaire minimum tax” and “tax deduction for new businesses from $5,000 to $50,000.”
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“If you listen to what she says, is to give more money for small businesses, more money for debt retirement, more money for housing. All of that would, I think, feed into the inflationary rise that we’ve seen under the Biden-Harris administration,” Moore Capito said.
“I mean, she says it’s an ‘opportunity economy,’ and then she goes back to the same old diatribes of every single Democrat campaign I’ve ever seen.”
FOX Business’ Eric Revell and Jamie Joseph contributed to this report.
