Bah Humbug! Biden’s Christmas Gift To America Is Going To Burn A Hole In Household Budgets

As President Joe Biden prepares to leave office in January, his administration’s legacy of surging inflation has delivered another year of increased Christmas food prices for Americans.

Various Christmas meal staples will be costlier this year, according to an end-of-year report from Expana, the world’s largest IOSCO-assured agrifood price reporting agency. Expana’s Main Meal Index, which tracks the prices of popular holiday grocery items such as shrimp, beef, pork, lamb, carrots and potatoes, increased by 2.3% year-over-year.

Expana’s “Gingerbread Index,” which follows the prices of wheat, sugar, butter, eggs, cassia and ginger, rose by 5.5% in November. The average price for bone-in hams also rose to $0.91 per pound last month — a staggering 8.3% increase from this time last year.

The average marketplace prices of potatoes experienced a slight uptick in November as well, increasing by 1.6% year-over-year to $0.50 a pound, according to Expana. Meanwhile, turnips experienced a 1.4% price increase at $1.45 per pound, while sweet potato prices rose by an average of 2.6% in November, reaching $0.50 per pound.

Prices have increased dramatically since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, with inflation hitting a peak of 9.1% in June 2022 — the same year that food prices in the U.S. increased faster than any year since 1979, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Although