America’s deepening affordability crisis summed up in 5 charts – CBS News
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America’s deepening affordability crisis summed up in 5 charts
By Aimee Picchi, Mary Cunningham
Updated on: November 19, 2025 / 5:27 PM EST / CBS News
Although inflation across the U.S. is far cooler than in the post-pandemic years, millions of Americans say they still feel the pinch of rising prices, struggle to pay the bills and express concern about their financial prospects.
Price increases are nowhere near the level reached in June of 2022, when the Consumer Price Index hit a 40-year high of 9.1%. Yet many people feel squeezed by the cost of simple daily necessities, including the ability to afford healthy food, and by long-term increases in the cost of essentials such as housing and health care.
This affordability crisis is rooted in a combination of both longstanding economic issues dating back decades and more recent developments. For instance, housing costs have surged partly due to a lack of available homes, a result of cutbacks in construction following the Great Recession, while more recently steep new U.S. tariffs have fueled inflation.
Inflation and the economy now rank as Americans’ top national concerns, according to an October CBS News poll.
“Everything is going up in price very quickly,” said Jeremy Tolbert, a 47-year-old web developer in Lawrence, Kansas.
With his family’s monthly health care premiums set to rise 18% to $2,600 next year, he’s planning to cut back in other areas. “Our food budget is going to go down — we’re not talking about eating beans and rice, but going from a comfortable middle-class lifestyle to eating how we did when we first got out of college,” Tolbert said.
Here are five key categories of spending that many Americans are struggling to afford.
Food
Almost half of Americans say it’s harder to afford groceries today than it was a year ago, according to a September survey by Axios and the Harris Poll. Only 19% said food prices are cheaper than a year earlier, with roughly a third seeing no change.
Editor’s Note: See the PRICE CHECKER in the online version only. Cannot add here.. –DrWeb
Growth in food prices has eased considerably, although it is still rising, with the latest CPI report showing grocery prices rose 2.7% in September on an annual basis, a sharp contrast to the 11.4% increase in 2022. Overall, however, food prices as of September were more than 18% higher than in January of 2022, according to the CBS News price tracker.
Shoppers don’t assess food costs the same way economists do. They focus on their day-to-day spending — which keeps climbing — and compare their out-of-pocket spending today with what they paid several years ago, according to research from the University of Florida.
In other words, people’s experience of inflation and how they measure it in their daily lives may not mesh with official economic measures that paint a more optimistic picture.
Meanwhile, other recent signals underscore the difficulty many Americans have simply putting food on the table. Roughly 14% of U.S. households reported food insecurity on average between January and October, up from 12.5% in 2024, according to data from Purdue University’s Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability.
In New York City, for example, 40% of local families can’t afford their weekly food costs, according to new data from charitable organization Robin Hood and Columbia University.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
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