If you pay attention to FOX News, you’re probably under the impression that gasoline is nearing $6 per gallon, stores are completely sold out of toilet-paper again, and milk prices are at record highs, and you would be wrong. A brief examination of historic price data for a number of key items reveals that Republican propaganda about inflation is ridiculously overblown, and American media outlets are failing to do their job by taking that propaganda at face value, rather than looking at actual price data.

CNN reported in early November that a family that buys 12 gallons of milk per week was being bankrupted by milk prices. The article falsely claimed that milk prices were recently only $1.99 per gallon, and the family was now paying $2.79 per gallon. A report published by the USDA on milk prices in a number of American cities published by the USDA reports no such change in milk prices has occurred. The report, which takes an average of prices from three retailers in any given market shows that while there are some areas that have seen a bump in price, overall milk prices are comparable to what they were in January of 2021.

Conservatives have also been insisting that under Biden gas prices are at all time highs. This is also a false claim, as the chart provided below by the Energy Information Administration clearly shows.

The trend that’s visible in this chart suggests that during periods where the US economy is adding jobs, that gas prices tend to go up. During periods when the US economy is creating a minimal number of new jobs, or the total number of jobs is in decline, gas prices fall. We see a rise up to 2008, when the US economy appeared to be in a “boom-time”, but then a sharp drop off after the results of the Bush/Cheney real-estate Ponzi scheme started wreaking havoc on the US economy. The flat gas prices seen during the Trump Administration appears to relate to the fact that Trump had the worst record for job creation since the Hoover Administration. There is a rise in gas prices during the Obama Administration when the economy was creating new jobs and crawling out of the Bush/Cheney Recession, and there is a rise now (thought not all time highs) now that Biden is leading the country out of the Trump/Covid Recession.

Republicans have also been claiming that store shelves are bare, and consumers can’t even find products to buy, but several fact-checks have revealed that the photos used in many of those stories are over a year old, and actually show bare shelves from March and April of 2020, and not October and November of 2021.

It is true that prices for homes and used cars have increased, but those prices are largely driven by shortages of homes and cars to buy. The shortage in new homes is driven at least in part by a shortage of lumber, driven by the combination of a Trump trade war with Canada over spruce, pine and fir logs, Covid outbreaks at a number of sawmills, and reports from some states that Construction Workers suffered some of the highest mortality rates of any profession from the Covid19 pandemic. The shortage of computer chips that brought auto manufacturing to a halt at many American plants appears to be at least partly rooted in the shutdown of a major Chinese chip-making plant in the Wuhan region, as well as Covid19 shutdowns that idled, or at least seriously throttled chip-making plants in other parts of China.

One of the tactics of many right-wing trolls is to try to turn every conversation into an over-simplified binary dialogue. One variation on this approach is when a liberal complains about lazy media reporting and failing to fact check conservative propaganda and a GOP/GRU troll jumps in with “So you admit the media is the enemy of the people”. This puts the person with liberal viewpoints on the defensive so they start defending the media, eager to avoid being lumped in with Trump’s “The media is the enemy of the people” rhetoric. While we should never go making blanket statements about the media as an “enemy of the people”, it is entirely appropriate to do like Jon Stewart used to do on the Daily Show, and point out when media outlets are being lazy and sensationalistic.