The Affordability Crisis Did Not Begin in 2025

America does not just have an affordability problem. We have a timeline problem, a data problem, and a voter-education problem.

I am not publishing this to promote Donald Trump, excuse his current policies, or turn KelvinForGeorgia.org into public relations for any President. I am also not willing to accept an economic timeline that begins in January 2025 simply because that starting point is politically convenient.

As a systems builder, I know that you cannot diagnose a system by looking only at its latest output. You have to trace the inputs, dependencies, decisions, and inherited condition of the system. You cannot start the movie in January 2025 and pretend you understand the plot.

The national Consumer Price Index rose from 261.582 in January 2021 to 317.671 in January 2025. That is an accumulated increase of approximately 21.4 percent. Year-over-year inflation reached 9.1 percent in June 2022.

Those facts do not mean Joe Biden personally caused every increase. Congressional Budget Office analysis identifies a combination of pandemic-era supply disruptions, heightened demand, fiscal and monetary policy responses, changing consumer behavior, shelter pressure, and later food and energy shocks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The precise causes were shared across systems and time. The timeline is still clear: the historic recent expansion in the price level happened during Biden’s term, and those accumulated prices did not disappear when the inflation rate declined.

Inflation measures the rate at which prices are changing. The price level measures what households are actually paying after years of accumulated increases.

If an expense rises from 100 dollars to 121 dollars, a later decline in the inflation rate does not automatically return the expense to 100 dollars. It usually means the already-higher price is rising more slowly.

That distinction explains why families could hear that inflation was improving while rent, groceries, insurance, utilities, vehicles, healthcare, and other necessities remained painfully expensive. The rate was cooling, but the accumulated damage was still embedded in household budgets.

The national CPI fell 0.4 percent in June 2026 and then increased 0.1 percent in July. In July, grocery prices declined 0.1 percent, energy declined 1.5 percent, and gasoline declined 2.9 percent for the month. That short-term easing is real.

But the July 2026 all-items index was 333.918, approximately 5.1 percent above January 2025. Over the prior 12 months, the overall index increased 3.4 percent, food increased 3.0 percent, shelter increased 3.2 percent, electricity increased 4.2 percent, and energy increased 14.7 percent.

The Atlanta-area picture also remained uneven. For the 12 months ending June 2026, overall prices increased 2.8 percent, food increased 5.5 percent, food away from home increased 5.9 percent, and energy increased 11.5 percent.

The defensible conclusion is not that Trump created the elevated price level he inherited, and it is not that Trump has already made America broadly affordable again. Some categories have eased. The overall price level remains materially higher.

An inherited problem does not release a current administration from responsibility for what happens next.

Tariffs may be used for industrial policy, national security, negotiation, or protection of domestic production. They can also raise the cost of imported consumer goods, equipment, and intermediate materials used by American businesses.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that tariff increases implemented between January 6 and May 13, 2025 would raise inflation by an annual average of 0.4 percentage points in 2025 and 2026 and reduce real economic output. That estimate does not mean every current price increase is caused by tariffs. It means current tariff policy cannot honestly be treated as cost-free.

National nonfarm payroll employment declined by 23,000 in July 2026. The unemployment rate was 4.1 percent, but payroll growth averaged only 34,000 per month during the prior 12 months.

The May and June estimates were revised downward by a combined 103,000 jobs. Labor-force participation stood at 61.4 percent and had declined 0.7 percentage point since January. Another 5.9 million people outside the labor force reported that they wanted a job but were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively searching or were unavailable during the survey period.

A stable headline unemployment rate does not erase weak payroll growth, falling participation, repeated downward revisions, or the experience of Americans trying to enter, reenter, or advance in the workforce.

Georgia’s latest available state report showed record labor-force and employment totals in June 2026. Employment increased by 10,359 during the month, and the unemployment rate held at 3.4 percent.

At the same time, payroll jobs declined by 10,100 during June and were only 6,000 higher than one year earlier. Healthcare and social assistance accounted for 23,500 year-over-year job gains, while federal government employment fell by 10,000, transportation and warehousing by 5,300, professional and technical services by 4,700, construction by 4,100, and nondurable-goods manufacturing by 2,800.

That is why one statewide headline cannot describe every worker’s reality. A healthcare worker may see a very different market from a technology professional, federal contractor, construction worker, transportation worker, veteran, recent graduate, or displaced mid-career employee.

The H-1B classification was created through the Immigration Act of 1990. It was not created by Barack Obama or Joe Biden.

The more serious structural issue is that an ordinary H-1B employer is generally not required to recruit U.S. workers before seeking an H-1B worker. The additional recruitment obligation generally applies to H-1B-dependent employers and previous willful violators. If a company claims it cannot find an American with the required skills, a documented search for qualified American workers should be a core requirement, not a narrow exception.

The public data also have major limits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics foreign-born category includes naturalized citizens, legally admitted immigrants, refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants. The survey does not separately identify those categories and does not ask noncitizens about their legal status to live and work in the United States.

That means broad foreign-born employment totals cannot be converted into an H-1B hiring or displacement count. In the July 2025-to-July 2026 comparison, foreign-born employment declined by approximately 278,000 and native-born employment declined by approximately 720,000. Both groups lost employment in that comparison, and the data still cannot tell us whether a particular American applicant was displaced by a particular visa worker.

The honest conclusion is that displacement and wage-suppression risks are credible policy concerns, recruitment safeguards are too narrow, and the public data are not specific enough to calculate the economy-wide effect. A data gap should be labeled as a data gap, not filled with partisan guesswork.

This is not about hating immigrants. Immigrants did not write these laws, design employer incentives, set public reporting standards, or decide how corporations use labor programs. Government and employers did.

Blaming every immigrant avoids confronting the system. Pretending the system can never disadvantage American workers avoids confronting it too.

The answer is transparent labor data, real recruitment requirements, enforceable anti-displacement protections, legitimate market wages, employer audits, outsourcing transparency, and serious investment in workers who already live here.

I will not tell Georgians that Trump created the affordability crisis he inherited. I will not tell them that the accumulated price increase during Biden’s term is irrelevant. I will not tell them that Trump has already returned prices to where they were. I will not tell them that tariffs have no domestic cost.

I will not claim that every immigrant took an American job. I will not pretend corporations never use labor and immigration systems to weaken workers’ bargaining power. I will not allow criticism of Biden to be dismissed automatically as Trump worship, and I will not allow legitimate criticism of foreign-worker policy to be dismissed automatically as xenophobia.

I do not owe any President my allegiance. I owe Georgians an honest timeline, a readable source trail, and policies that protect residents without manufacturing enemies.

The truth does not have a party registration.