June 27, 2026 | Guest Essay from Lael Brainard and Rohit Chopra
New York Times — Guest Essay: “We Crunched the Data: There’s a Grocery Price Emergency in America
Drawing on our new national polling, the expertise of our policy team, and conversations with families in Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, and Arizona, the piece from Lael Brainard and Rohit Chopra makes the case that Americans need policymakers to lower the cost of essentials now while also fixing the root causes. They write:
“From a distance, the American economy might appear to be performing well. Growth is solid, unemployment remains near historic lows and stock markets have posted large gains over the last year.
But these numbers mask the reality that most Americans see. We dug into the data, conducted surveys and talked to people around the country. Our research shows that even relatively well-off families are struggling with high prices, despite the tax cuts and wage gains that the Trump administration touts.
President Trump and Congress are neither investing in long-term solutions nor offering short-term relief. If they paid attention to different indicators of Americans’ financial health, beyond top-line growth and other traditional measures of economic success, they might feel more urgency.
So we developed one: a model budget for a family of two parents and two children under 8. We set their annual income at $130,000 — well above the roughly $83,500 national median for all U.S. households, and right in the middle of the income distribution for a family of four.”