They Raised the Price. Then They Blamed You For It.
Your sandwich costs $14 now. Your rent jumped $800. And the second you ask for a raise to cover it, suddenly you're the one wrecking the economy.
Cut the crap. That is not the order this happened in.
What Actually Happened
Prices moved first. Wages are still chasing them, months behind, and still losing the race.
In June, average hourly earnings hit $37.64, up 3.5% over the year. That is the actual number the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, not a talking point somebody invented. In May, the Consumer Price Index came in at 4.2% year over year. Gasoline alone was up 40.5%.
Do that math yourself. Wages are not outrunning prices. They are chasing them and falling further behind every single month.
But “workers demanding too much” tests better on cable news than “shareholders extracting too much.” So guess which story keeps getting repeated back to you.
The Language Does the Dirty Work
Notice how this gets described. A landlord raising your rent is “responding to the market.” An insurer hiking your premium is “managing risk.” A grocery chain raising prices is “supply chains.”
Then a worker asks for a raise to cover those same costs, and suddenly they are “a threat to price stability.”
Same behavior. Different verdict. One side gets described as a passive victim of circumstance. The other gets treated like the disease. That is not an accident of language. That is language doing the work of protecting whoever already has the pricing power.
The Receipts
Your paycheck: Wages grew 3.5% this year. Prices grew 4.2%. You did not get a raise. You got a pay cut with extra paperwork.
Your grocery bill: The Economic Policy Institute found corporate profits account for roughly a third of all price growth since 2019. The long-run historical average is about 11%. That gap is not “supply and demand” doing its thing. That is margin, and it used to be yours.
Your receipts, literally: In June, the DOJ and 17 state attorneys general caught Cal-Maine, Hickman’s, and Versova red-handed, coordinating for nearly three years, from 2022 to 2025, to rig the exact benchmark that sets what you pay for eggs. The playbook was simple: flood a pricing index with bids nobody actually intended to fill, just to push the published number up. It worked. They got caught, and they paid $3.3 million combined. On profits that ran into the billions. That is not a scandal. That is a business model with a rounding error taped to it as punishment.
My Take
Since 1979, worker productivity is up 90%. Worker pay is up 33%. That gap did not vanish into thin air. It went straight into corporate profits, executive pay, and shareholder checks, and it has been doing that quietly for over four decades, under both parties, no matter who was in the White House.
This is not a Trump problem or a Biden problem. This is a pricing-power problem. Whoever sets the price wins. Whoever does not, pays for it twice. Once at the register, and again when their raise gets blamed for the register.
That is the actual divide in this country. Not red versus blue. It is the people who get to set the price versus the people who have no choice but to absorb it.
There is a word for what happens when one side holds all the pricing power and the other side holds none.
Extraction.
What’s Next
This will not stop with eggs. Every time inflation runs hot, the same script gets pulled out: blame the paycheck, protect the margin, let the profit-share number quietly become the new normal. Prices almost never drop back to where they started. Neither will your rent.
Next time prices spike, watch who gets called “responsible for inflation.” It is never the shareholders. Watch that pattern do its work, not whichever party happens to be holding the microphone when it happens.
